Earlier this week a federal judge declared that Google is a monopolist. But as our friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial board note, it is a very strange monopolist, known not for harming consumers but for helping them:
“Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions,” Judge Mehta writes. “The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.” ..
Startup Duck Duck Go also “made a bid to be the default for private browsing mode searches on Safari,” but neither it nor Microsoft “succeeded in part due to their inferior quality.”
This makes for a very strange monopolist–one that does better by consumers because its search engine is superior. “Google’s partners value its quality, and they continue to select Google as the default because its search engine provides the best bet for monetizing queries,” the judge explains, adding that Google “has continued to innovate in search.”
We at Unleash Prosperity have had problems with Google’s search engine algorithms, but this is a private company that owns its products and services. God forbid that government starts treating it like a public utility and search engines become regulated by politicians.
It’s hard to see how any court-ordered remedy could benefit consumers when the “monopolist” is already providing them a product they freely choose (there are dozens of alternative search engines) at a price that is FREE.