David McCabe, reporting for the New York Times:

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in a 277-page ruling that Google had abused a monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling.

John Gruber writes at Daring Fireball why this is happening:

It’s worth a reminder that under U.S. antitrust law, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. It’s just that monopolies must operate under different rules, and Mehta has ruled that Google broke (and continues now to break) those rules.

Back to McCabe, noting how Google’s legal team is going to appeal, but was somehow proud that the judge acknowledged that Google search is the best product on the market:

Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said the company would appeal the ruling.

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” he said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

What happens when a monopoly is actually the best product on the market? Surely most consumers would actively choose Google when given a choice over other competitors. There are more quality search competitors now than in decades, among them DuckDuckGo, Kagi, and of course potential offerings from OpenAI as well. But how many people in the general internet-using public are even aware of these?

It will be very interesting to see where this ends up once the remedies are outlined. If nothing else, I do hope that Apple will relax its stance on allowing for custom search engines within Safari.