It’s been almost four years since the United States filed its antitrust lawsuit against Google – and a decision on the case finally arrived: A U.S. district court judge ruled Monday that Google has built a monopoly on online search – something travel companies have long voiced frustration about.
Justice Department antitrust official Jonathan Kanter called the ruling “a landmark decision” – one that holds Google accountable. Meanwhile, Google has said it will appeal the decision. “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” said Kent Walker, president for global affairs for Google.
Now that the ruling has come, how are travel industry leaders reacting? What kind of impact does the industry expect to see as a result? Will it see big changes?
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Jared Alster, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Dune7
It’s certainly a landmark ruling that sets a precedent for future “big tech” cases. That said, it’s unlikely to change anything for marketers in the near future. There will be appeals that may last for years.
Oddly enough, if Google is forced to break apart its various search and ad tech products, it could actually hurt brands. Remember that the same consumer data and data privacy issues that were raised in this case benefit marketers as they look to hone in on their audience targeting.
Marketers should continue to adopt a diversified acquisition channel strategy including organic and paid search.
Craig Everett, co-founder and CEO of Holibob
While this should reduce some marketing costs, it doesn’t solve the underlying issue of the industry’s over-reliance on paid Google ads to acquire customers. That will require continued innovation around the use of first-party data and creating exceptional consumer experiences – which perhaps folks will invest in with those savings.
Rami Nuseir, head of marketing for Stay22
Google has had a monopoly over search for a long time. Over 90% of searches are Google. It’s now a verb, which literally means to “look something up online.” You don’t say to “yahoo it,” you say to “Google it.” This monopoly has allowed Google to control a huge aspect of business for nearly two decades. It’s why when Google released several updates over the course of the last year, each one more devastating than the last for bloggers and small online businesses, the world collectively had to deal with it. When approached with the fact that it was decimating small businesses, Google shrugged. With this ruling, I hope Google will think twice before doing something reckless with people’s livelihoods, if only to avoid more bad press.
Brennen Bliss, CEO of digital travel marketing agency Propellic
Today’s antitrust ruling against Google could significantly impact travel companies that depend on Google for bookings – mostly for the better. While the full impact will depend on any injunctions or rulings that come after this decision, we might see lower advertising costs and new opportunities on different platforms – Bing, DuckDuckGo and more. The timing is also perfect for SearchGPT, which was announced just last week and could seize market share.
Most mainstream search engines model their organic algorithms off of Google’s, so there is minimal risk to existing SEO strategies. Search ads, however, are a different story; travel companies should be ready to quickly onboard with new ad platforms as this plays out if they currently only advertise on Google Search.
Rod Cuthbert, founder of Viator
The court has confirmed what we knew already — Google is a monopoly and acts like one. But now what? The ruling comes as the whole search industry is bracing for [artificial intelligence]-driven change that seems certain to upend everything anyway, court ruling or not. One thing seems certain: Google has the inside running in both paid and organic search and is unlikely to give it up anytime soon.
Christian Watts, CEO of Magpie
It looks like capitalism is working. I don’t think Google has done anything wrong here. It’s a very reasonable deal with Apple: “Send us some traffic, and we’ll share the revenue.” But on the other hand, monopolies are clearly bad, and Google has been too successful. So the government steps in. I suspect armies of attorneys will argue for the next few years, Google will pay a settlement of a few [billion dollars], and Apple users will be delighted with default icons for Bing, Yahoo and Alta Vista.
It’s a bit ironic that Booking is getting the same treatment in Europe, and one of the best tools to disintermediate the [online travel agencies] — Google Travel — has also been attacked by the Europeans as anti-competitive.
This will all get resolved just after the entire search infrastructure has been turned upside down by AI, and the government lawyers will have to start again.
Max Starkov, hospitality and technology consultant
What do WebCrawler, Yahoo Search, LookSmart, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, Dogpile, Inktomi, Ask Jeeves, Alltheweb, Caffeine and Apple Search have in common? These were all search engines that dominated Internet search at one point or another, most pre-dated Google and had first movers’ advantage, and many challenged Google for dominance after it emerged. They all failed.
Why? Because of Google’s superior technology and talent.
What will be the impact of this latest antitrust ruling on travel and hospitality?
Short term: No impact. The current ruling and anticipated appeals by Google will take years to pan out. One way or another.
Mid Term: Google’s exclusive contracts with a number of platforms will be revised (Apple, etc.) to make them non-exclusive. But where would one find a better alternative search engine?
Long Term: The search space will be populated by a number of generative AI search engines like OpenAI Search engine, Claude, etc., so consumers will have plenty of options to choose from. Will these new search engines have the deep pockets to finance an undertaking like this one and the tech talent to execute it? Will they have the market acumen and persistence to establish new search products in the marketplace? Remains to be seen.
The question is, how many of them will abandon Google and switch to another gen AI-powered search engine? Even today consumers have the choice to abandon Google and switch to Bing or DuckDuckGo (what an unappealing brand name!). How many have done it? Google gets 82 billion visits per month! YouTube – another 31 billion. ChatGPT? A paltry 3 billion!