The Justice Department’s Case Against Google Should Alarm Every Business Leader

The Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google Search should set off alarms in every boardroom across the country. The case, now entering its remedies phase, signals a troubling shift in American antitrust enforcement away from protecting consumers and toward punishing business models that succeed too well. 

Here’s the message the DOJ is sending: If your company out-innovates rivals, secures valuable partnerships, and achieves scale by building products that users and business partners choose freely, federal regulators may accuse you of stifling competition — and demand that your company be restructured, your business partnerships canceled, and your proprietary systems provided to competitors. 

That’s not a warning from a dystopian future. It’s what the DOJ is seeking now against Google. 

Let’s start with the facts. The court found that Google built its market position in search through technical excellence, business savvy, and achieving scale. It hired top engineers and relentlessly innovated. Its breakthrough in ranking websites — pioneered by Stanford graduate students in the late 1990s — quickly made it the leading player in search, supplanting the once-dominant Yahoo. 

This is the textbook definition of innovation-driven growth. Google built a superior product and found effective ways to get it into users’ hands. By 2009, it handled 80 percent of U.S. internet searches. Today, it’s closer to 90 percent. Yet that rise — gradual, incremental, and continuing to deliver value — has drawn the ire of regulators. 

Read the full op-ed here.