You might have heard about what has been happening to Google. Yes, the Google Antitrust Lawsuit: Google is getting sued by the US for "unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets"^[1]. The case started in 2020 and is still ongoing.

This has been getting my attention since Brodie Robertson decided to post 3 videos about it over the 3 months:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfWyixZvTNA
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-Trd-fU0rQ
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWCjJe-Rx1M

In short, Google is said to be required to sell Chrome and possibly even Android to third-parties^[2], reasons being:

• Google has been leading the search engine competition overwelmingly by including it as the default search engine on many browsers
• To include Google as the default search engine on Firefox and Safari, Google paid Mozilla $450 million^[3] and Apple $20 billion^[4]
• Google also paid Samsung and others^[5]
• This means Google is actively bribing different companies to make sure Google search is constantly leading the market, allowing them to raise prices for ad placements on the search engine, and show results that benefit Google higher on the page.

What is Antitrust Law?

Antitrust law (aka. Antitrust Act / Competition law) is an important legal concept in capitalist societies because it requires the government to enable all parties to contest equally. From Wikipedia,

Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies.

Antitrust law is essential, preventing companies from controlling the entire market. Having control over an entire market is very dangerous, like in the case of Google, allowing them to make sure most, if not all, people that want to advertise their products on search engines, will only come to Google, meaning Google can artificially inflate their ad prices to higher and higher levels, and people will still be forced to come to Google.

But, believe it or not, this is NOT the first time the antitrust law has been applied to a major tech company.

Intel vs AMD: CPU Performance Race

From Figure 1 and Figure 2, we can see that in late 2005 and early 2006, AMD's market share actually went over Intel's. What happened?

Well, in 1999, AMD launched the AMD Athlon processor, and since then until January 2002, it "was the fastest x86 in the world", and was "sold at speeds up to 1000 MHz". Some sources stated clock speeds "[up] to 1.4 GHz". Even though Intel maintained its leading market share, Athlon posed a significant threat to Intel's position.

In 2000, Intel released the Pentium 4 family. Some processors (e.g. Pentium 4 Northwood) achieved speeds up to 3.4GHz.

Slashing back Intel's defence, the AMD Athlon 64, as the name suggests, came with exclusive (back in 2003) AMD64 (aka x86_64), support, and generally larger L2 cache size (1 MiB vs 512 KiB). Even with a lower clock speed, it still managed to outperform Pentium 4 in overall performance. (https://youtu.be/p8EAuscJ4o4)

In 2004, Intel released the Pentium 4 Prescott microprocessors. Its clock speeds "only scaled 12% beyond Northwood" due to its high power consumption and heat output, meaning its general performance is still lower than Athlon 64.

In 2005, AMD released the AMD Athlon 64 X2 microprocessors, and as the name suggests, they "incorporate two Athlon 64 cores on one die". The dual-core design allows the CPUs to also shine in places where multiprocessing is crucial.

In response to the dual-core shenanigans, Intel also made their CPUs dual-core — with Pentium D. Making things dual-cored might sound like a good idea, but it also means you have to double the power consumption and the heat output, which is why it absolutely failed to catch up.

The Trick up Intel's Sleeve

In desperation, Intel employed two business practices: (quoted from here)

• Offering conditional rebates to computer manufacturers for purchasing all or nearly all of their x86 CPUs from Intel
• Making direct payments to computer manufacturers or placing restrictions on the distribution of x86 CPUs to incentivize them not to purchase those products from Intel’s competitors (also known as “naked restrictions”)

In 2005, the Japan Fair Trade Commission published a document ordering Intel to immediately stop the aforementioned illegal practices that advocate private monopolisation. Following the order, AMD in the US had also filed suit, leading to a settlement in 2009 that costed Intel US$1.25 billion.

In 2009, the European Commission fined Intel €1.06 billion for their anti-competitive strategies, including "[granting] discounts to computer makers including Dell, Lenovo, HP, and NEC", but the general court overruled this decision later in 2022, leading to a revised fine of €376 million from the Union. The overrule is also still in appeal.

Why Antitrust Law is Important

Antitrust Law is the sane mechanism stopping unfair competition. Having fair competition means that consumers can enjoy different options with a balance in product price and quality, while monopolisation allows companies to take full control of the market and artificially increase prices.

In the case of Intel, the rebate system and (more clearly) the naked restrictions are preventing competitors from getting larger market share albeit better product quality, leading to the different legal cases.

In the case of Google monopolising the search engine market, since Google has been similarly paying different companies (Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, etc.) for setting Google as the default search engine, they're now getting sued for possible violations of the law.

Control over search engine results is very important, not only because they can potentially gain more revenue from advertisements, but also because they can always recommend products that benefit Google (e.g. YouTube) over their competitors, creating a larger monopoly over multiple fields.

Conclusion

The current Google antitrust lawsuit reminds us of the importance of fair competition, because in capitalism, calling a market full of monopolies "free" is quite literally nonsense. When we talk about open source software, we protect our end-users by making the source code open to everyone: tech giants, gay people, Kim Jong Un, the Martians, or maybe that single June Fish in my fridge, can freely use our software. The same goes for capitalism: to protect consumers, everyone should have the same rights to compete freely and fairly in the open market. Everything goes down to choice, because we believe everyone should always have the chance to choose their favourite cup of search engine, software, coffee, or tea.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to:

• hurriphoon: very interesting video on the Intel lawsuit in Japanese
• Brodie: videos with relatively detailed insights on the Google lawsuit