Google Ruling Could Give Huge Boost to Microsoft Bing

• A district court judge has decided that Google has a monopoly in the search market.

• That ruling could provide a boost to the number two search engine.

All research shows that Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google has at least 80% of the search market share in the United States. Some data puts that closer to 85%. Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing has between 5% and 7%, and Yahoo has a majority of the rest. These numbers have not changed much in over two decades.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote a 277-page opinion about Google’s place in the U.S. search world. The concussion boiled down to just a few words: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Google will appeal.

What the Ruling Could Mean for Bing

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Does the number two search engine have a chance?

Part of the U.S. government’s argument is that Google pays companies, including Apple and Mozilla, to have Google as the search engine in their browsers. Google responded that people use its search product because it gives much more accurate and useful results. If Google cannot make these deals, it opens the door wide to Bing, because it may have a chance to bid for the browser partnerships with Google blocked from competing.

Bing generates about $6 billion a year for Microsoft. Google’s search division brings in about $200 billion. Neither of these figures includes international sales, but they still give an idea of the financial scale involved. Additionally, Bing would probably need to pay billions of dollars to Apple, for example, to be its default search engine, even if Google were not in the running. (Apple could always turn to Yahoo to force Microsoft to pay more for a browser deal).

It is much too early to tell whether the Google deal would add tens of billions of dollars to Bing’s revenue. One question Microsoft faces is whether the public considers Google the much better product. At this point, that is not clear.

Google will appeal the antitrust ruling. If it loses, Bing could become a major Microsoft profit engine.

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