U.S. v Google Winds Down with Pointed Questions from Judge

U.S. v. Google is a historic antitrust trial with far-reaching implications, and it will conclude tomorrow, as closing arguments from both sides wind down.

The stakes are high for the biggest U.S. antitrust action since the Department of Justice (DOJ) took on Microsoft over 20 years ago. And to his credit, Judge Amit P. Mehta is taking his role as a precedent-setter for the many other Big Tech-related court cases to come: He started the penultimate day of the trial by turning the table on the lawyers, asking probing questions to see whether their arguments held up under scrutiny.

Taking a devil’s advocate stance, Judge Mehta argued to the DOJ’s lawyers that “search today looks a lot different than it did 10 to 15 years ago,” thanks to Google’s hard work. “It seems to me a hard road for you to go down for me to conclude that Google hasn’t innovated enough,” he said.

Of course, U.S. antitrust law isn’t that simple. A monopolistic can innovate and break the law, and the DOJ’s position is that the software giant did just that by illegally maintaining its online search monopoly, harming competitors and consumers.

Judge Mehta also took Google’s lawyers to task for their assertion that Google Search didn’t just compete against rival search engines, but also against other seemingly unrelated services like Amazon for shopping, TikTok for music clips, or ESPN for sports. If the market definition is expanded this way, they argue, then Google doesn’t even have a monopoly, and it couldn’t have behaved illegally.

“I don’t think the average person would say, ‘Google and Amazon are the same thing’,” he retorted to that line of reasoning, adding that when he wanted to find out a fact related to sports, he used Google Search, not ESPN.

While Google’s case has obvious parallels with U.S. v. Microsoft, there are some important differences. No one is overreacting by suggesting that Google should be split up, for example. And if Google is found guilty of breaking the law, the punishments will likely be behavioral in nature.

The ruling could take several weeks or even months. But you have to think that Amazon, Apple, and Meta, each of which faces its own U.S. antitrust scrutiny, as well as rivals like Microsoft, are all as eager to see how this turns out as is Google.