Earlier this year, in one of the most absurd court rulings in modern times, federal judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google violated U.S. antitrust law by gaining a monopoly in the search engine markets.
In the days or weeks ahead, the courts will decide whether to break up one of America’s most iconic companies or to sell off some of its activities and products. The latest reports are that the courts may require Google to sell off its popular Chrome browser. (To whom? China?) It may also require Google to surrender other products to help erase its market lead.
With a market cap of roughly $2 trillion, Google is one of the five most profitable companies in the world. It got there by offering a search engine service for free to hundreds of millions of customers. This may be the largest benefit to consumers of any company in world history.
Yet the courts ruled that: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” It was found guilty of violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Yet the Sherman Act was meant to protect against companies that use their size and scope to raise prices. Google’s sin is that it produces superior products at prices that are too low. One statistic was cited as evidence of monopoly behavior: Back in 2009, Google controlled 80% of the search engine market, and today it is closer to 90%.
What was remarkable and dangerous about this decision is that the courts openly conceded that Google gained this dominant market share by making the best search engine, and that it is made easily available to almost all consumers at very low costs.
How weird is this? Keeping prices low and relentlessly improving product performance is illegal because it is unfair to a company’s competitors? This is doubly absurd given that we have the Biden administration accusing companies like grocery stores of raising their prices. So in America today, if you raise your prices, you are a greedy profiteer, and if you lower your prices, you’re a monopolist that has to pay restitution to your less efficient competitors.
The argument for breaking up Google gets even more nonsensical when you listen to the Biden administration’s cockeyed excuses for punishing Google. The Department of Justice’s chief antitrust officer says: “This landmark decision … paves the path for innovation for generations to come and protects access to information for all Americans.”
This is a preposterous statement. Few, if any, companies spend more money on product innovation and refinement than Google does. And as far as “protecting access to information for all Americans,” no company in history has opened up more access to information than Google. No other company even comes close. It has brought the equivalent of the entire Library of Congress to the fingertips of everyone with a laptop computer in a matter of a few seconds. That’s not an antitrust violation. It is a miracle of innovation that deserves our deepest appreciation.
Even worse, this lawsuit piggybacks off the hostile actions by America’s European and Chinese tech rivals, whose inferior search engines can’t compete with Google. As recourse, they want to loot tens of millions of American shareholders who invest in Google. Instead of defending an American company against foreign raiders, we have the U.S. Justice Department and federal courts giving aid to those hostile lawsuits and bolstering their legitimacy.
Can anyone imagine for a moment that a German or a Japanese or a Chinese court would be stupid enough to rule against their own domestic company that has come to dominate a globally strategic industry and has created tens of thousands of high-paying jobs for its citizens while making hundreds of billions of dollars for its own citizen shareholders? Only in America.
Many conservatives moan that Google has developed algorithms that discriminate against viewpoints and studies that have a right-leaning perspective. That’s definitely a problem, but there are many other search engines available, like Bing and DuckDuckGo, that consumers can use as alternatives to Google. We certainly don’t want the government or politicians like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren regulating what can and can’t be accessed on a private search engine platform. Even worse would be handing more business over to Chinese browsers that will clearly serve up misinformation.
Several years ago, a landmark study by economists Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and Avinash Collis of Carnegie Mellon University estimated that the median U.S. user values search engines at $17,500 per year. Today, that number is easily more than $20,000 of value added for the average person with a laptop computer or a smartphone — which is nearly all of us.
This is the very definition of a gift horse to nearly all Americans. And our government and its throng of lawyers with goofy legal theories are risking killing it.
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is also an economic adviser to the Trump campaign.
