The courts have decided that Google is a monopolist. Is it time to break the company up?

What benefits will result from the historic U.S. court decision last month that Google is a monopolist?
We can expect that the remedies, or penalties, imposed on Google will result in greater consumer choice in online search and that search quality will improve.
The remedies agreed to in a settlement between Google and the U.S. Justice Department, which brought the antitrust case against Google, could have far-reaching benefits beyond genuine competition in online search.
Freed from Google’s overbearing influence in the digital ecosystem, inventors and entrepreneurs — everyone from app developers to digital platform builders — would be better able to create innovative products that drive gains in economic productivity. 
The Google ruling has potential “to open one of the most important digital markets to competition and innovation,” says Keldon Bester, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project.
The ruling also strengthens U.S. antitrust enforcers in their cases against Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram) and Ticketmaster and its owner, Live Nation Entertainment. Google faces a separate antitrust trial next month over its alleged monopoly in online advertising technology.
Canada’s Competition Bureau is investigating Google’s advertising practices to determine if Google is improperly suppressing competition in the online ad industry.
And the U.S. ruling against Google could hobble Big Tech in its bid for dominance in artificial intelligence (AI).
In his Google decision, which Google says it will appeal, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that “Google is a monopolist, and has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
In a second phase of the case that begins early this month, Mehta will decide on remedies to a monopoly that Google maintains in part by paying more than $26 billion (U.S.) in 2021 alone to smartphone makers Apple and Samsung, wireless providers and other tech firms to make Google the automatic, or default, search engine on web browsers and mobile devices.
Those agreements “have given Google access to scale that its rivals cannot match,” Mehta said in his decision.
Google is the world’s biggest search engine, processing an estimated 8.5 billion queries per day.
With its control of almost 90 per cent of online queries, Google also has a monopoly in online search advertising and can inflate its ad rates with impunity, Mehta found. That cost is passed on to consumers.
Google parent Alphabet derives most of its $300 billion in annual revenues from advertising.
In the remedies he decides on, Mehta will be influenced by the landmark 1956 antitrust case against AT&T, the biggest tech monopoly of the 20th century.
The settlement reached by AT&T and the U.S. Justice Department required AT&T to stay out of the emerging market for computing products.
AT&T was also forced to license, free of charge, thousands of its patents to unrelated parties.
Those remedies helped expedite the rise of critically important industries, including general-purpose computing and semiconductors.
Most industry observers don’t expect that Google will be forced to divest its Chrome web browser and Android operating system.
More likely is that Google will be required to curtail its payments to digital providers.
Mehta said the preferential treatment that Google pays for gives it the luxury of not having to invest in improving its product, to the detriment of users. 
And deprived of fees from Google, Apple would have an incentive to develop its own search engine. Apple’s Siri voice assistant is getting an AI overhaul this year.
The AI-powered Perplexity search engine claims better search results than Google. And AI pioneer OpenAI launched its SearchGPT search engine in July.
Mehta noted that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has an 80 per cent share of searches on Microsoft’s Edge browser. That, he said, proves that other search engines could succeed if Google wasn’t preset on most digital devices.
Still, it’s difficult to see search rivals achieving the scale to provide meaningful competition to Google without access to Google’s immense accumulation of user data.
An effective remedy, modelled on the 1956 AT&T decree, would require Google to provide others with access to that data, on which superior search is based and AI is trained.
Google would benefit from real competition.    
“Companies always produce their best products and services when their feet are held to the fire,” Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, wrote in a recent New York Times essay that assessed appropriate remedies for Google.
By contrast, monopolies and oligopolies tend to shun innovations that might undercut their existing businesses. Victims of that phenomenon include Kodak, Xerox and the Detroit Three automakers.    
Wu cites a U.S. commercial aircraft industry consisting mostly of Boeing — “an oversize and ossified company,” Wu says, “that exhibits every symptom of what (U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Louis Brandeis called ‘the curse of bigness.’ ”
The rallying call of the internet’s founders was “Information wants to be free.”
The outcome in the Google case should take a significant step in that direction.