A federal judge ruled Monday that Google has a monopoly in internet search and illegally used contracts with Apple and other tech companies to maintain that unfair position. For years, the company has acquired other businesses to build out its offerings, assembling an empire that now spans many markets and serves billions of people.
In the quarter-century since Google was founded, the company has grown mind-bogglingly big. Every day, billions of people around the world ask questions on Google Search, send messages using Gmail or navigate their commute with help from Google Maps. The tech giant dominates the internet economy, consistently spends more than almost any other group or company on lobbying the federal government and over the years has rapidly expanded its business by buying hundreds of firms. In 2023, it generated $307 billion in revenue, the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Finland.
In the coming months, the judge who declared Google an illegal monopolist Monday will decide how to penalize the company, potentially banning it from signing deals to make its search engine the default on smartphones and web browsers offered by other companies, or even ruling that Google’s myriad businesses should be broken up.
Either way, the case is likely to influence other major lawsuits against other Big Tech companies, including Amazon and Apple. The remedy imposed on Google could dramatically change how people use the internet.
Google has nine products with more than a billion users each. Here’s what they are.
Google search — 4.9 billion users
This is the business at the center of the government’s allegations. Google is the world’s most important search engine, and it truly dominates the space, controlling 92 percent of the market, which equates to 4.9 billion people, according to StatCounter and the International Telecommunications Union. Microsoft’s Bing comes in second with a paltry 3 percent, while a handful of such country-specific players as Yandex in Russia or Baidu in China round out the final few percentage points. Google is far and away the world’s most-visited website, with more than 86 billion visits a month, according to internet data provider Similarweb. The company’s control of search has allowed it to rake in cash year after year and use that money to expand into other businesses through acquisitions.
Now, Google is beginning to upend search even more. In May, the company began placing AI-generated answers on the top of search results for all U.S. users. They are created by algorithms trained on content scraped from the web, and could hurt publishers who rely on traffic from Google for their survival. The feature also sometimes goes wrong, serving up mistruths. Shortly after launch Google was forced to rein in the feature, saying it needed more work.
Chrome — 3.4 billion users
Google owns the world’s most popular web browser. The vast majority of desktop computers and a huge portion of mobile phones have Chrome set as the default way for users to interact with the internet. Around 3.4 billion people used Chrome as their web browser as of 2023, according to StatCounter and the International Telecommunications Union. Owning Chrome gives Google the ability to keep its search engine front and center, but also allows it to track people all over the internet, giving it incredible amounts of granular data on online behavior, especially when it comes to advertising and e-commerce. As Chrome took over the internet, web developers began building websites so they would run optimally on the browser and caring less about making them work smoothly on such rivals as Microsoft Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox. Eventually, even Microsoft threw in the towel. It’s new browser, Edge, is built off a version of Chrome. Analysts have said that if the judge rules that Google should be forced to split up its business, such as turning Chrome into a separate entity.
Android — 3 billion users
More than 3 billion people use smartphones running Google’s Android operating system, the company said in 2021. That is around 70 percent of all the smartphones in the world. Apple’s iOS is a distant second at 28.5 percent. Like Apple, Google uses its operating system for its own smartphones. But it also makes the software available to other phone and tablet companies, and that is where Android’s true power comes in. Because Android has become the default operating system for most of the world’s phones, Google can put its other services, including Search, Maps, YouTube and its app store, in front of billions of people.
Google Play Store — 2.5 billion
Around 2.5 billion people use Google’s version of the app store every month, the company says, making it much bigger than Apple’s app store. The Play Store lets Google charge a commission on every app sold, as well as get a cut of transactions made through those apps. The power Google has over the mobile app ecosystem is so great that the company has been the target of major lawsuits, and in December 2023 a judge found Google’s Play Store is an illegal monopoly. Android phones, unlike iPhones, don’t require apps to be downloaded through the official app store, and in China, numerous other app stores exist. But in most of the rest of the world, using an Android phone means going through Google to get your apps.
YouTube — 2 billion users
Google’s online video service is a juggernaut in its own right, with 2 billion users, according to the company. YouTube says 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Much of it isn’t very high quality, but it shows just how massive a role YouTube plays as an entertainment site, social media platform and video archive. If you added the run time of all 454 feature films released in the United States in 2022, at an average of two hours per film, you’d get around 900 hours of content. That is less than everything uploaded to YouTube in two minutes.
Google Workspace — 3 billion users
Google’s archenemy is Microsoft, and the company has for years worked to compete with Microsoft’s core products — its productivity suite, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Though Google still hasn’t dethroned those products, its own tools have grown rapidly over the years, benefiting from being bundled into other Google services such as Gmail. At the end of 2022, Google said its “Workspace” apps, which include Docs, Sheets and Google Drive, had more than 3 billion users.
Gmail — 1.8 billion
Email was the original reason for many people to go online in the first place. Companies like Microsoft and Yahoo fought vicious battles in the early years of the commercial internet to build huge email businesses. Google was late to the game, but when it began offering much larger amounts of free storage than its competitors, it quickly began winning over customers. Now, Gmail is the undisputed king of the email world, with 1.8 billion users according to marketing research firm DemandSage. In the past several years, Google has gotten people to begin paying for all that storage they got used to, opening up a huge source of revenue for the company. But Google also makes money from Gmail by placing ads in it. More recently, customer emails have helped train the company’s artificial intelligence auto-complete email feature. And the company wields huge power over the internet simply by being in control of the rules that dictate which emails end up in users’ primary inboxes and which are sent to the spam folder.
Google Photos — 1 billion users
Google’s photo-storage app grew to a billion users just four years after launching in 2015, a company executive told Fast Company in 2019. It benefited from being wrapped into Google Drive and as a default photo-storage tool on Android phones. But the app is hugely popular with iPhone users, too, thanks to Google’s offer of large amounts of free storage. Now, millions of people pay Google monthly just to preserve the photos they have stored in the tool, providing a significant extra boost to revenue. Google Photos is also a major proving ground for the company’s AI tools. The company is using the app to test out new features, including making it easier to edit out certain people from photos and even making it look as though people are smiling when in reality they were frowning when the photo was taken.
Google Maps — 1 billion users
Google was also late to the map game, with rivals like MapQuest already running major businesses when it first came on the scene. But the company gradually took over the space, and now it’s the tool people predominantly use to navigate the real world. Google crossed a billion monthly users in 2012, and the company’s user base in the space has only grown since then. Even on iPhones, where Apple has tried for years to get people to use its own default maps app, many people still download Google Maps and use it exclusively. Maps soon turned into a huge reviews site, shaking the businesses of such companies as Yelp and Tripadvisor, and putting Google into competition with a whole different set of companies. Like most of Google’s businesses, Maps is also an advertising platform.
What’s next
The Department of Justice’s trial, which focused on Google Search, isn’t the only legal challenge the company is facing. In September, it went on trial over allegations that it uses its control over the internet advertising system to benefit its own products and squeeze out competitors. The case is being compared to Microsoft’s fight with the government 20 years ago.
Google argues that the internet is a lot bigger than it is, and that companies such as Amazon, Netflix, TikTok and upstarts such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI are all competing with it for people’s time, attention and money. Still, Google’s empire extends far and wide. It has a self-driving car company, one that does medical research and its own venture capital firm. It buys and rents fleets of ships to lay undersea cables across oceans to ensure its data travels as fast as possible.
A spokesperson for Google declined to provide updated numbers on users of its products and further comment on the trial.