(There are really important antitrust issues in the ad exchange but that isn’t the case the government brought!)
To me that looks like an actual antitrust violation but the DoJ and FTC aren’t investigating bc they are obsessing about “big tech” uselessly and bringing bad cases they are going to lose!
If you want your regulators to actually do something about a lack of competition in the US economy (which they really should be doing!) there are a ton of markets worth investigating before they waste their time on this loser of a case.
It's also a lot better than the ads market is, with literally one dominant player that monopolizes all stages of the supply chain. This is literally what Standard Oil did, controlling the wells, the refineries, and the distribution railroads to shut out competitors.
If you look at financial exchanges, there's a very good reason for the brokers and exchange to all be different companies.
But, hey, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s a bad case being done for show. Slap on the wrist, back to business as usual sort of deal.
But to your earlier point: > On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) is this: we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. What’s more, the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google.
Don't you think the counter argument to this, is, "No it's not that easy to just go to bing when you buy out the default search on rivals' browsers and operating systems and have the browser and mobile os with the world's largest market shares"? I get that the attack here is directly on search but it would be surprising to me if this wasn't part of the case. It seems insane to bring this case if there isn't a component focused on the browser and OS conflict of interest in search.
I’m looking for an analogy for you. The claim is that Google has monopolized the search market. It’s difficult to find actual monopolies in real life bc generally antitrust regulation works well (pace Lina Khan).
Think about a small city with two independent hospitals which then merge. That’s closer to a monopoly. There is a potential harm to consumers here bc traveling to go out of your local market for hospital services brings real costs: travel time, inconvenience, etc. That gives the newly merged hospitals power in the market. (Maybe not to the level of a monopoly, but likely substantial market power nonetheless.)
Applying something like this analogy to your counter argument: literally all the consumer has to do to avoid Google’s so-called monopolization of the search market is type the letters “b-i-n-g-.-c-o-m”. That’s entirely different from the hospital case.
It’s going to be very very very hard for the government to establish that google has anything like monopoly power here. Remember: making a better product and as a result having a large market share is not a crime. Google is going to say that since consumers can costlessly switch to a competitor who is also free, the reason they have 95% market share is bc their product is better.
I find it very hard to imagine that they will lose this case. It’s possible! But it seems really unlikely to me.