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Hello and welcome to The Excerpt.

I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Thursday, November 7th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

Is this a special episode of The Excerpt. Is Google just too big?

The U.S. government seems to think so.

The Department of Justice has initiated antitrust proceedings against Google,

accusing the tech giant of maintaining an illegal monopoly and its search and advertising sectors.

This marks the most significant attempt to dismantle a major corporation since the breakup of AT&T back in the 1980s.

If successful, this could drastically alter how millions of Americans access information and use online services.

How is Google responding? And what could a Google breakup mean for you? Here to wade through all

of this is Florian Editor, professor at Boston University's Questrum School of Business.

Thanks for coming on the excerpt, Florian. Thank you very much for having me, Dana.

First, help us understand why the Department of Justice going after Google.

What are the primary reasons?

This is a lawsuit and a trial that's long in the making.

This is not a super recent development.

This is actually a lawsuit that started in

2020. So everything in antitrust moves relatively slowly. And the antitrust lawsuit alleges that

Google has monopolized the market for online search. And that's a violation of Section 2 of

the Sherman Act, which is one of the key parts of antitrust law in the United States.

...