Alphabet’s Google (GOOG, GOOGL) is reentering the courtroom on Monday, September 9, to face off with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in its latest antitrust lawsuit. After a judge ruled Google’s search engine to be “monopolistic” last month, this latest suit has Justice officials focusing on Google’s advertising businesses.
Cornell Law School professor of law and economics George Alan Hay sits down with the Catalysts team to discuss the details of the trial.
“Most of the time the remedies are ‘don’t do this anymore.’ So, for example, in the early Google case, a lot turned on contracts between Google and Apple and other producers. And clearly what’s going to happen, at the very least is, those contracts are going to have to be unwound,” Hay, the former chief economist for the DOJ Antitrust Division, tells Yahoo Finance. “The contracts gave a Google default placement on the browser. So there’s some behavior, some behavior that Google has to have engaged in to try to prevent competition from coming in.”
Hay finds antitrust crackdowns on Big Tech to almost be the new norm: About five years ago, “the antitrust community more or less woke up to the fact that, ‘wait a minute, we’ve got these huge platforms out here that really [we] haven’t been taking a closer look at from an antitrust perspective.”
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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.