Opinion | US Judge Has Declared Google A ‘Monopolist’. What’s India Doing To Ensure Fair Digital Play?

A US district judge has declared that tech giant Google illegally holds a monopoly over search services, therefore cornering the revenue stream and advertisements. The verdict marks a major shift in digital antitrust enforcement. The basic philosophy of antitrust laws is to make sure businesses compete fairly with regard to the stakeholders whose content is being used, and ensure they get a fair share in the revenue: this also means wider choices for consumers. The landmark decision has profound implications for Google, its competitors, and internet users globally. 

The judge concluded that Google maintained its monopoly through anti-competitive practices. The court found that Google’s agreements with companies like Apple and Samsung, which set Google as the default search engine on their devices, unfairly suppressed competition. These agreements were not necessary for improving search services, but were instead strategies to crowd out rivals and reinforce Google’s dominance. This is a significant win for the US Department of Justice and state attorneys general who argued that Google’s practices stifled competition and innovation. Google’s defence team sought to highlight the quality of its search engine compared with competitors like Microsoft’s Bing, suggesting that its market dominance is a result of providing a better product. However, the court’s decision challenges this narrative, focusing on the monopolistic tactics employed to maintain that dominance.

The Real Game

Big Tech, in its behaviour, is geared towards dominating different aspects of the digital economy and information consumption by ensuring default search sites, which results in them cornering advertisements, and allows them to inflate the rates. At the same time, they are reluctant to share the revenue with the publishers who are content providers for these platforms. 

The real game is revenue. Google has 39% and Facebook 18% of the digital ad revenue worldwide, with the figure being in single digits for the remaining platforms – from Amazon to TikTok, Apple and Microsoft. The large percentage of revenue share is because of Google’s monopolistic mechanism to corner content and reach through Apple and Android systems. It exposes not just Google’s monopolistic mechanisms, but also its failure to fairly share this revenue with the content that enriches Google. Google’s monopoly is often borderline exploitative to stakeholders like content providers. 

That is the reason country after country has gone ahead to define a ‘bargaining code’. 

India contributes a big percentage of users when it comes to internet news-seeking. In India, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is the parent ministry defining ‘publishers’ and ‘intermediaries’, and they want to address the issue as and when the proposed Digital India Act sees the light of day. 

What is important to immediately stop the injury? The Competition Commission of India can take cognisance of the unfair play once there is such a provision. However, that rule-making seems to be in standstill mode.

A shift is needed for breaking monopolistic behaviour and ensuring visibility and usage of alternative search engines. If users get other options, advertisers will also move to these search engines. The different alternatives will trigger competition and better digital discipline in terms of privacy, data handling and fair practices to all the stakeholders, including the content providers. 

Besides the technology of faster search, the ultimate goal is the quality of content offered by a search engine, and that needs to be respected. 

The author is a practitioner development economist and retired Secretary, GoI

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