• by Wendy Davis , August 12, 2024

In what may prove to be a short-lived victory for Google, a federal judge in California late last week dismissed search users' antitrust claims against the company, but said she will allow the users to reformulate their claims and bring them again.

The ruling, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin in the Northern District of California, stemmed from a lawsuit brought in April 2022 by Mary Katherine Arcell and around two dozen other search engine users. They claimed that Google monopolized search by arranging to serve as the default search engine for Apple's Safari and on Android devices. The plaintiffs suit came almost 18 months after the U.S. Department of Justice made similar antitrust claims against Google.

U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila in California dismissed the complaint by Arcell and the others last year, ruling that the plaintiffs hadn't shown how they may have been harmed by the alleged antitrust violations.

The search users subsequently filed a revised complaint that included additional allegations about Google's search engine -- including claims regarding Google's use of data.

“Plaintiffs and consumers must relinquish their personal information to Google during their search and, as a result, suffer a loss in privacy, which is an invasion of a legal right, and which is a valuable commodity in and of itself,” they alleged.

They added that in a non-monopoly situation, “consumer data would not be harvested from users without compensation.”

Google countered that those allegations were “specious and unavailing.”

“Plaintiffs have not identified what 'personal data' they claim Google 'uses' that other search engines, like Microsoft Bing or Yahoo Search -- who are not accused of wrongdoing or of possessing monopoly power -- do not use,” the company argued in a motion filed with in March.

Lin -- who took over the case from Davila last year -- largely sided with Google on that point, writing in a dismissal order handed down Friday that the users' amended allegations were conclusory and speculative.

“Beyond conclusory assertions, plaintiffs offer no facts to make plausible their claim that if Google had not foreclosed competition, an alternative market would have materialized in which search engines offer more privacy protections or compensate users for their search data,” she wrote.

But she also said the users could amend their claims, adding that U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta's recent ruling against Google suggests “amendment may not be futile.”

She noted that Mehta flagged DuckDuckGo as a privacy-protective search engine that couldn't compete effectively due to Google's search distribution deals, and a lack of access to data.

That finding, and others relating to competition among search engines, “suggest that, due to Google’s allegedly anticompetitive use of default agreements, competitors offering better privacy or an ad-free alternative were unable to offer the same high quality of search as Google, due to their lack of access to a large volume of user data,” Lin wrote.

She added that even though Mehta's findings “were made in another litigation involving different issues,” the ruling indicates that Arcell and the others “may be able to plausibly allege facts about consumer harm from the alleged anticompetitive effects of Google’s default agreements.”

Google declined to comment on the ruling.