DOJ's case against Google relies on proving restrictive contracts protected its dominant position, a similar move to the antitrust case against Microsoft
The Justice Department's antitrust case points to restrictive contracts, a focus that a professor said “is as old as the Sherman Act.”
Context & Ripple Effects
When the DOJ and 11 Republican state AGs filed suit alleging Google acted anticompetitively to preserve its search and search-advertising monopolies, the theory of attack was deliberately familiar: restrictive distribution contracts of the kind that anchored the Microsoft antitrust case, a playbook one professor traced back to the Sherman Act itself. Not everyone read the filing as principled — Techdirt framed it as election-season cronyism rather than genuine concern about monopoly power.
First-order effects
- Google must now defend those restrictive contracts in court as pro-competitive rather than exclusionary, with the DOJ needing to prove they protected an already-dominant position — the exact burden structure of the Microsoft case.
Second-order effects
- The competitive pressure the case exposes runs both directions: Microsoft's own 2019 'very, very worried' email about falling behind Google shows how far incumbents will go to counter Google's reach, while prosecutors extended the fight to advertising with the 2024 ads-focused trial alleging dominance built through acquisitions.
Third-order effects
- If the contract-based theory holds, default-placement and exclusivity deals become a repeatable template for attacking platform gatekeepers — and by 2023 analysts judged the case likely to succeed precisely because it was rooted in demonstrable harms like overcharged customers rather than abstract market-share arguments.
The trend: US antitrust enforcement is reviving restrictive-contract theories against dominant platforms, using search as the proving ground before extending to adjacent markets like ad tech.