Did you know that Google has been embroiled in a legal battle since 2020? You'd be forgiven if you didn't, as it hasn't been at the forefront of the news for a while now. However, the case has finally wrapped up with a pretty big result; the US Department of Justice has found Google guilty of breaching antitrust laws.

The US DOJ finds Google guilty of using antitrust to establish a search engine monopoly

As reported by Axios, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has declared that Google has been breaching antitrust laws to establish itself as a monopoly in the search engine market.

Both sides had put forward their arguments. Search engine rivals, such as Microsoft with its Bing engine and DuckDuckGo, accused Google of buying its way into a monopoly. The main example they gave was how Google paid Apple billions of dollars every year to set its search engine as the default option for the Safari search engine. Google's rivals stated that they were never given the offer to buy their way into becoming Safari's default search engine, and even if they were, it would come down to who had the most money to throw around.

Google's argument was that people weren't using its search engine because it was the default option. Instead, users were simply pleased with Google's quality of service, and therefore personally opted to use its search engine versus its competitors. However, the judge ruled that "Google did not provide a valid argument as to why [the contracts] exist" and found the tech giant guilty of antitrust.

There's still a lot to go through; for example, the lawsuit was set up to see if Google was guilty of antitrust, so the DOJ hasn't established what it wants Google to do in light of this. And as Axios mentions, there's a near-guaranteed chance that Google is going to appeal it. Until then, it's a large victory for search engines living under Google's shadow.