This week’s Local Search Tuesdays focuses on the Google Antitrust lawsuit. A judge has ruled on the case, and Greg breaks down the ruling and its future impact on consumers and search results.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m going to chat a bit about the bit antitrust ruling against Google, and what it actually means.
On August 5th, a U.S. District Judge released a massive 277 page ruling, the culmination of a four-year case against Google by the U.S. Department of Justice. Remember the very public Google hearings that were all over the news last fall? This is the outcome of that case.
The court ruled against Google, saying it violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by both holding a monopoly and knowingly working to maintain that monopoly.
Honestly, no one is that surprised, and nothing is likely to happen any time soon. Google has already stated its intent to appeal, so the process could drag out for years.
But let’s speculate a bit – what COULD happen? Personally, I don’t think it’s likely that the core of Google’s search product will be affected in any way. The court recognizes in the document that Google “has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices”
Google owns something like 90% of the search market worldwide. What are they going to do, tell everyone they can’t use Google anymore? The court even talks about the “power of the default”, basically saying it’s incredibly difficult to change deep-rooted consumer habits.
The ruling mostly concentrates on the exclusivity agreements that Google has put in place, so the most likely outcome is that those agreements will be adjusted or completely thrown out. For those who don’t know, Google paid billions to several device manufacturers to ensure that Google was set to be the default search engine on phones and tablets.
It’s unlikely that organic results will be affected by the case, since there’s no way to change consumer behavior and it would take years and many millions of dollars for any company to create a viable competitor to Google.
It’s far too early to predict what will happen with Google Ads, but I’d bet that we’ll see some changes here if Google’s appeal doesn’t succeed. There’s no real way to adjust competition, so it’s far more likely that the court will require some sort of controls around ad pricing.
Honestly, I think the scariest part of all of this was a statement buried on page 189 of the ruling. It says “Over the years, Google has tested whether it can profitably raise its text ads prices by 5% or more without losing substantial advertisers, and the results have been largely consistent – it can”
Years ago, Google’s mantra was “do no evil” – and that statement is pretty much the polar opposite of do no evil.
Everyone in SEO has made a “no one uses Bing” joke at some point in their career… And the judge who wrote the ruling managed to squeeze in a zinger towards the end. When he’s explaining the massive scale of Google search volume, he mentions that on desktop, users enter nine times as many queries on Google as all other search engines combined. On mobile, it skyrockets to 19 times. Then, as he explains how on of Google’s ranking models runs on 13 months of Google’s click and query data, that’s the equivalent of over seventeen and a half years of Bing data.
And with that zinger, we’re out of time for this week’s episode, so you know what that means.
Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome.
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
