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Hearings for the US anti-trust lawsuit against Google began on September 9, 2024.
Company statements by Microsoft, Baidu and Yandex, a search portal formerly based in Russia and now headquartered in the Netherlands, show that even with users’ preference for one or the other search engine in specific markets, advertising revenues are only a fraction of those of Google.
For example, Yandex holds a 64 percent search engine market share in Russia, but only managed to generate revenues of $3.7 billion in 2023.
Baidu, thought to be the leading search engine in China, with Statcounter putting it at around 53 percent market share in August 2024, recorded annual revenues of $10.6 billion in 2023, an increase of eight percent in Chinese yuan countered by unfavorable exchange rates.
Even when disaggregating Google’s advertising revenue by subsegments and factoring in Microsoft doubling its search and news advertising revenue from 2021 to 2022, the playing field is still far from level.
The Google Search segment alone netted the company $175 billion in 2023, according to its most recent annual report.
Given these circumstances and the precedent set by the first antitrust lawsuit lobbed at the U.S. tech company, the second antitrust case against Google could very well result in another loss.
