“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the ruling states.

www.theguardian.com/technolog…

Of course, Google is a monopoly. They have been for over a decade and closer to two decades.

If this quote from The Verge is true, Google’s CEO was a pretty damning witness and admitted that Google intentionally froze the ecosystem in place.

 The judge found former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy “a particularly compelling witness,” pointing to his answer about why Google would pay billions of dollars in revenue share to maintain default status if it already had the best search engine. Ramaswamy told the court that the payments “basically freeze the ecosystem in place.”   www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/…

Thanks to The Verge’s “brilliant” reporting, I can’t source this quote again, but I pulled it before they removed it and shared it across several Slacks and Discord groups.

As far as Alphabet/Google goes, the US Government should break them up and disassemble the company. That outcome may depend on the result of the 2024 election, but both the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are signaling that they intend to follow through.

I suspect Mozilla has the most to lose over this ruling. Google accounts for a significant portion of Mozilla’s revenue and has historically kept them afloat. However, I suspect the days of Google paying any company to be its default search are numbered.