Google is legally a monopoly – how will this impact markets?

Google is legally a monopoly, a US court has ruled. What does this mean for the search engine and global markets?

Google Launches New Products At "Made By Google" Event
(Image credit: Justin Sullivan / Staff)

We'd probably suspected for years that Alphabet’s Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) search engine unit effectively had a monopoly on the way we navigate the internet. There are other search engines out there and other web browsers, but hardly anyone ever bothers to use them. And “googling” something has become so commonplace that we have turned it into a verb. 

But now it is official. A US court has ruled that Google is legally a “monopoly” and that it was guilty of exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation. In a 277-page ruling, Judge Amit P. Mehta argued that the company has done everything in its power to maintain its lock on the market and muscle out potential rivals. 

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Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg, and writes weekly commentary syndicated in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Miami Herald. He is also an associate editor of Spectator Business, and a regular contributor to The Spectator. Before that, he worked for the business section of the Sunday Times for ten years. 

He has written books on finance and financial topics, including Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031. Matthew is also the author of the Death Force series of military thrillers and the founder of Lume Books, an independent publisher.