Google will face a scaled-down antitrust lawsuit over search after a judge ruled that state AGs didn't show that Google's search results harmed rivals like Yelp
The state-led challenge grew out of a 2020 bipartisan attorney-general effort focused on Google's treatment of its own products in search. This ruling preserves a narrower case while rejecting one route for tying search presentation to harm to vertical rivals.
Google no longer has to defend this set of state claims on the theory that its search results harmed rivals such as Yelp; the remaining search case proceeds on a reduced scope.
State attorneys general and rival services lose a judicially unsupported theory of harm in this action, raising the importance of the claims and evidence that survived.
Second-order effects
Rivals seeking relief over placement in general search may need to pursue more targeted cases or build more direct evidence of competitive injury, as Yelp's later local-search complaint illustrates.
Google can concentrate its defense on the surviving search allegations, even as separate litigation tracks—such as the advertiser case that survived in part—continue to demand legal and management attention.
Third-order effects
If courts continue to require concrete proof that search-result design injures rivals, antitrust challenges to platform self-preferencing may increasingly turn on narrowly defined markets and demonstrable downstream harm rather than broad claims about ranking.
The pattern points to fragmented platform enforcement: a setback in one theory or case need not settle scrutiny of the same firm's adjacent search and advertising businesses.
The trend: Platform antitrust enforcement is becoming more granular, with broad theories of search favoritism tested through separate cases, markets, and evidentiary standards.
A win and a loss for Google in getting US antitrust cases dismissed. Win: The argument that Yelp should show up more prominently in Google results but doesn't because they are a competitor was dismissed...
Reading Judge Amit Mehta's decision on the Google antitrust case. A bit of an embarrassing mistake. “Smaller players in the market include Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Ecosia, and Neeva.” Neeva has gone out of business due to Google's monopoly.
In a ruling today, Judge Mehta rejected CO's theory. He said it “rests on a multi-linked causal sequence that relies not on evidence but almost entirely on the opinion and speculation of its expert....Remarkably, not one [these] opinion...cites to any record evidence.” 12/ [image…
Huge win for @Google over DOJ. Not a surprise given the political roots of the case: Bill Barr moved ahead w/ this lawsuit over the objections of antitrust career staff in the waning days of the Trump Admin. Via @dmccabe & @nicoagrant 1/2 https://www.nytimes.com/...
A federal judge is putting Google on trial for using its monopoly power to shut out rival search engines. Important work by @JusticeATR, @MassAGO, and dozens of state AGs to enforce the law against Google's anticompetitive and unlawful actions. https://www.reuters.com/...
An AI angle to the ruling: ChatGPT & Bart show that search is evolving even more from links to answers/chatbots. Websites may not like the decline in traffic, but consumers benefit from faster answers. If courts HAD agreed w/ CO that G owed traffic to sites, bye bye chatbots.
The court went on to add that CO failed to produce evidence for its bank-shot theory. “Simply put, there is no record evidence of anticompetitive harm in the relevant markets resulting from Google's treatment of” specialized search sites. 13/ [image]
Of note, in the updated article: 'Judge Mehta allowed the core of [DOJ's] case to stand. But he dismissed three of the agency's claims regarding management of the Android operating system, its relationships to phone makers that use Android and its Google Assistant service.'
Today, G universal results look much better than when they first launched 16 years ago - to consumers' benefit. They might “hurt” Yelp - but courts have said that that's not an antitrust problem, esp. when consumers can navigate to https://yelp.com/ or Yelp's app. 15/ [image]