Given that Google attracts more than 136bn visits a month — as much as the next 12 most popular websites combined — it is easy to see how a US federal judge concluded last year that the company ran a monopoly in online search and had abused its market dominance.
Last week, Judge Amit Mehta heard the final arguments about what remedies to impose. His conclusions are expected in August. The US justice department, which launched the antitrust lawsuit, is demanding that Google be broken up. It wants to force the company to sell its Chrome browser, ban the massive payments it makes to Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to be their default search engine, and share data with competitors. That would surely be a triumph for free-market competition, motherhood and apple pie.
Yet, as ever with regulatory interventions, the skill lies in ensuring that any corrective action anticipates tomorrow’s challenges rather than just trying to fix today’s problems.