I have been reading the Google Anti-Trust documents just out of curiosity and what I have found is interesting and when you add the history of Google it starts to come together nicely so let me explain.

Google did not plan to become a monopoly

For many people, we don’t remember Google in the old days be for the longest time Google was backed by an investor Yahoo. Google’s success kept Yahoo floating for many years as Yahoo lost market share their ownership in Google kept the company profitable. Yahoo invested in Google cause they wanted to get out of the Search business and into the media business.

Google made a better search product and many companies were partnering with Google to let them do the search since they did it better. Companies like AOL used to give Google their keyword information as part of financial deals or Google would provide search and get paid. Yahoo for many years had Google handled the search on the backend of Yahoo and Google got paid.

Once Google lost deals with AOL, Yahoo, and others Google bought AdWords. Google decided search advertising was the future of the company not providing search engine services to already established companies.

Google made a better product

Part of the way Google got to be the standard was because Microsoft made Internet Explorer so bad that people looked for alternatives. Think about this Microsoft bundles the Internet Explorer with Windows it was so bad that people wanted an alternative that was better that’s how Chrome got to be the dominant browser on the desktop. At this point remember not many people are on Mac and there is no smartphone so everyone, for the most part, is on Windows at this point.

When it came to search you had Google or your other options with Bing which had just been released by Microsoft, Ask, or Yahoo. Microsoft Bing was so bad that being the default on iPhone till around 2017 and being the default search on Windows could not make it a competitor for Google or get much enough market share to even concern Google.

Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Docs are among the three products that Google made better than helped them along. Before Google Maps you had MapQuest, which was bad, email in the cloud was terrible and online word pressors did not exist. These great products help move users away from other products to Google which helped Google get more market share.

What Google did wrong

The Google Anti-Trust claim is not saying Google being a monopoly is an issue it is using their monopoly power to stop competition. For example, paying Apple 19 billion a year to be the default search engine who could afford to pay that a year to be the default search engine.

One issue that has been brought up in the Google Anti-Trust case is Google services. Google pushing their own services to the top of Google search for example they always push YouTube, Google shopping, Google Local to the top of the search results. They have the advantage as well of knowing what we are searching for on a daily basis. Google could say we know 50 to 70 percent of people are searching for this let’s start this service. Just because you have a better service does not mean you are going to get higher on Google rankings Google services always rank the highest.

Conclusion

The Google Anti-Trust case has an issue with Google using its monopoly power in an abusive way. The case against Google is going to affect them going forward. I will be curious to see what happens and how Google business will change in the future.