Widener University Commonwealth Law School
MONTH-IN-BRIEF (Aug 2024)
Google Contracting to Be the “Default Search Engine” Violates Antitrust Law
By Brian Jones, J.D. Candidate, Class of 2026, University of Chicago
On August 5, 2024, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia found Google liable for violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act in the antitrust case United States v. Google LLC. The Department of Justice and eleven states initiated the suit in late 2020, and it was later consolidated for trial with State of Colorado v. Google, where thirty-eight states had made similar claims under the Clayton Act.
While Google is unsurprisingly the default search engine for its own Chrome web browser, Google has also contracted with Apple and Mozilla to serve as the default on the Safari and Firefox web browsers. Chrome is the exclusive preloaded browser on all Android devices, with the exception of Samsung devices, and Safari is the exclusive preloaded browser on all Apple devices. While consumers can change to another search engine on any of these browsers, research in behavioral economics has shown that people tend to stick with defaults, as it requires more effort to make changes. Therefore, the “stickiness” of these defaults protects Google’s dominant position and shields it from meaningful competition.
