A U.S. District Court Judge just handed down a devastating ruling for the godfather of all the Big Tech censors–Google.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled Monday in U.S. v. Google that “Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” Former Attorney General William Barr filed the lawsuit initially while Donald Trump was still president. Fox News host Laura Ingraham celebrated the decision on the Aug. 5 edition of her show The Ingraham Angle. Crediting the Trump administration, Ingraham said the former president “may be a Google slayer.”
In his ruling, Judge Mehta specifically noted that he found Google to have a monopoly in “general search services” and “general search text ads.” According to the Sherman Act, such violations can lead to $100,000,000 in fines for a corporation, but the consequences of this decision could go much further.
Mehta added, “Google’s distribution efforts are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects; and Google has not offered valid procompetitive justifications for these agreements. Importantly, the court finds that Google has exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive prices for general search text ads. That conduct has allowed Google to earn monopoly profits.”
The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google reached its current dominance of internet searches by paying companies such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products. Google has paid Apple $8-$12 billion a year for such prime treatment, according to The New York Times. Such efforts have clearly borne fruit as Business Insider reported that 90 percent of internet searches take place on Google and its subsidiary YouTube, amounting to billions of searches a day.
Mehta noted this market dominance prominently in his ruling, which mentioned that Google already hosted 80% of “all search queries in the United States” by 2009. The ruling also pointed out that Google spent $26 billion in ad revenue in 2021 to ensure that its corporate partners not only gave the search giant “default placement” on their devices but also that they agreed “not to preload any other general search engine on the device.”
Thirty-six states and three U.S. territories joined the lawsuit including: Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona, Iowa, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that the State Department be held to account to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and that Big Tech mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
