Generally something is legal until there’s a law saying it isn’t. That’s kind of how it just works in America, and it not just here either.
When that Google-AOl deal Google wasn’t even close to as popular as it is now. It was a simple distribution deal. People are tunneled in on the iPhone because that’s Apple’s juggernaut now but this deal with Apple also goes back to like 2002 when I was still convincing people to switch off Yahoo and MSN to Google. They also made a similar deal with Mozilla which is still basically how Mozilla is still able to operate at all.
I mean 2002 Yahoo probably could have outspent 2002 Google. 2002 Microsoft definitely could have and it’s not like MSN was a juggernaut, but they were complacent. I’ll just say it: Google wanted it more. Search and Advertising was basically all they were at the time, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no YouTube or any of that other stuff we associate with them now, and they went out and took the opportunities they could. They developed a toolbar for IE users, setup distribution deals for the toolbar, put it in the Firefox directory, and sought out new avenues of information to index like when they acquired Deja News and Blogger, and subsequently launched Froogle, Google Blog Search, Google News, Alerts, Images, Patents, GOOG-411, etc. Even acquiring and developing Android was a play that ensured even if their relationships went south and Microsoft came to dominate Mobile in a way that was beginning to look a lot more possible in 2006 (and not so much in 2011) they would never be entirely locked out of Mobile if that ever became a thing (which uh, spoiler alert, it did).
And when did Google really start to look like the juggernaut in the room? Well in Jan 2005 they had 35.1% of the search market to Yahoo’s 31.8% and a year later Google was at 41.4% to Yahoo’s 28.7%.[1] So probably you could say sometime about 2004 around when they IPO’d, maybe, is the soonest you could say they were really a juggernaut. That’s dominance but that sure isn’t anything close to a monopoly, and they were just outcompeting in both quality and distribution and in their search and ad product offerings. Acquiring DoubleClick even after Microsoft bid up the price was also a pretty good hat trick that was like a rocket booster for their ad business, putting Microsoft in a position where they had to spend almost twice as much for aQuantive only to write it down 5 years later.
This is why antitrust law is so scuffed. The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge. They’re going to lose hard while playing up whatever small victories they can get along the way while wasting a lot of money in court and then the administration is going to change again which might continue any cases in progress but is still going to have its political priorities shift.
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/search-engine-market-shares-in...