In a stunning opinion issued last week, Judge Amit Mehta of the District of Columbia District Court found that search engine giant Google is a monopolist in violation of the Sherman Act. Now, reports are emerging that the Justice Department is considering a breakup of the company, a rare move not seen at this scale since the breakup of the Bell telephone system in the 1980s.
Antitrust scrutiny is not the only problem facing Google, though. The artificial intelligence boom has shaken up the tech sector, and Google is betting big on its Gemini large language model against competitors like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Meta’s Llama 3.
Nationwide, litigation against Google (and its parent company Alphabet) is accelerating too. Docket Alarm analytics shows a general increase in lawsuits over time, as well as a massive spike of litigation in spring of this year.
In April and May 2023, the company received nearly 150 lawsuits each. Dozens of these lawsuits each month were filed by school boards and districts; these lawsuits are brought against not only Google and Alphabet but also Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, and even gaming platform Roblox. The lawsuits are now organized into In Re Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, a multidistrict litigation.
As the MDL title implies, the lawsuits allege that the defendants, who operate social media platforms, should be held liable for the negative addictive effects of social media. The MDL has been open since 2022 and is proceeding before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California. Google is represented by a few law firms in this case, primarily Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.
Despite this recent flood of litigation in the product liability area, Google’s top lawsuit category since 2019 remains patent, as is the case for many tech companies. Anti-trust cases, while potentially massively consequential, are comparatively infrequent for Google, placing below patent, product liability, civil rights, and more.
Geographically, the vast majority of federal litigation involving Google takes place in the Northern District of California, where the company and most of its competitors are based. Second is the Western District of Texas, famously a haven for patent litigation Third is the Eastern District of Wisconsin, which features a number of criminal cases seeking access to Google accounts and devices.
It is a critical moment for Google – the rapidly developing competitive landscape for AI, antitrust scrutiny, as well as the specter of large-scale social media litigation will shape the company’s path in the coming years.