Google Is Big. Does That Make It a Monopoly?
ICLE President and Founder Geoffrey Manne was quoted in this Reason story on whether Google constitutes a monopoly. Read full story here.
In United States v. Grinnell Corporation (1966), the Supreme Court distinguished between “the willful acquisition or maintenance” of monopoly power (which is illegal), and monopoly power that results “from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product [or] business acumen” (which is not illegal). Under this view, Google has dominated the search market as “the consequence of a superior product.” Its search engine is simply so much better than Bing that “there’s no price that Microsoft could ever offer” to replace it as an iPhone default.
“The fact that Google search has an 80% market share even on Windows devices, where Edge is the default browser and Bing is the default search engine, demonstrates that consumers go out of their way to use Google because they believe it is the best option,” argues?? Geoffrey Manne, an antitrust expert and president of the International Center for Law & Economics. That’s the Field view.