When was the last time you did a Google search? Very recently, right?
What about a search on Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo or Bing?
On Aug. 5, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google “is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” noting that Google “enjoys an 89.2 percent share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9 percent on mobile devices.”
The Department of Justice and a consortium of states contended that Google’s preeminence as an internet search engine is an illegal monopoly, made possible by Google’s paying more than $20 billion each year to companies such as Apple and Samsung to lock out competitors. Judge Mehta rejected Google’s argument that it would be “an unprecedented decision to punish a company for winning on the merits.”
Google’s unsuccessful defense boiled down to this: We are successful because we provide a better search engine. Don’t punish Google for being so good!
Google will appeal Judge Mehta’s ruling. Said its president of global affairs, Kent Walker: “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”
This news gives rise to the question: Is “Google” a legally-protected word? First, a little history.
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their search engine “BackRub” for its analysis of the web’s back links. They brainstormed other names that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. They decided on “googol,” which means ten to the 100th power. Their friend Sean Anderson suggested “googolplex,” which means ten to the googol power. Sean erred when he did a search of the internet domain name registry database to find out if “googol” was available. He misspelled it as “Google.” Because it was available and appealing, in 1997, Larry and Sergey registered their domain name “google.com.”
“Google” is now one of the most valuable trademarks in the world, worth billions of dollars. In a court proceeding, cybersquatters who incorporated “Google” in 763 domain names, such as “googledisney.com,” sued Google, claiming that “Google” was in the public domain because, they contended, “Google” as a verb had become generic for any search engine. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 disagreed, holding, based on the evidence, that the consuming public overwhelmingly understands the word “Google” to identify a particular search engine, not to describe search engines in general.
In effect, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the mere use of a trademark as a verb does not result in genericide — loss of trademark protection because of common usage no longer identifying a trademark as referring to a particular brand.
Thus, “Google” did not go the way of aspirin, cellophane, escalator, heroin, kerosene, lanolin, laundromat, linoleum, thermos, trampoline, yo-yo and zipper (all once trademarks and now in the public domain), but instead joins Band-Aid, Coke, Crockpot, Jacuzzi, Kleenex, Ping-Pong, Popsicle, Q-tips, Scotch Tape, Vaseline, Velcro, Xerox, and other legally-protected trademarks, even though all in common use. You can Google that.
Stewart Edelstein, a Stockbridge resident, is author of several books, including “Dubious Doublets: A Delightful Compendium of Unlikely Word Pairs of Common Origin, from Aardvark/Porcelain to Zodiac/Whiskey,” “The Covid-19 Zeitgeist: Fifty Essays,” and “An Alphabetical Romp Through the Flora of Berkshire Botanical Garden from Agave to Zinnia.”