Will Google Antitrust Decision Affect Ongoing Lawsuits Against Apple And Meta? Legal Experts Are At Odds

The historic ruling against Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL is one of several in the Big Tech antitrust arena.

Google, deemed monopolistic, violated antitrust laws with its search engine, Judge Amit Mehta ruled.

Some experts say the verdict could affect similar lawsuits against other major companies, including Meta Platforms Inc META, Amazon.com Inc AMZN and Apple Inc AAPL.

The FTC, for example, is pursuing antitrust cases against Meta and Amazon for allegedly acting as monopolies.

The Department of Justice is also pursuing a case against Apple. A trial will commence in September in a separate Justice Department case against Alphabet seeking to break up its ad tech operations.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a Vanderbilt University law professor who studies antitrust, told the New York Times that Mehta’s Google decision is "a predictor of what other courts might do."

"You can also expect other judges to read this opinion and be influenced by it,” she said.

In USA Today, Loyola University Chicago School of Law professor Spencer Weber Waller called the decision a “major boost" for ongoing cases against Apple, Amazon, Meta and Alphabet.

Others, however, argue that the ruling is unlikely to affect the other pending tech federal antitrust cases. The Google case focuses narrowly on search engines, which is dissimilar to the other lawsuits.

Parts of the ruling could actually help antitrust defendants, observers say. Mehta threw out a claim that one of Google’s ad tools was designed to give the company an advantage over Bing.

Herbert Hovenkamp, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, noted to Reuters that the portion affirms precedent that companies rarely have a “duty to deal” with rivals. This could help Apple in its case.

“Any case, including Apple, in which a duty to deal is a major portion, is going to get a close look,” Hovenkamp said.

William Kovacic, a professor at George Washington University Law School and former commissioner of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, agreed that the “duty to deal” portion of the decision is favorable to defendants.

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