*

Federal judge sides with antitrust enforcers against

Google

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Ruling supports Apple's ( AAPL ) defense in its own antitrust case

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Apple ( AAPL ) argues reasonable limitations on third-party

developers

are not anti-competitive

By Ajithkumar Dhevarajan

Aug 25 - Apple ( AAPL ) could be the winner after

Alphabet's Google lost its fight with the U.S.

antitrust enforcers earlier this week, with a ruling that

supports the iPhone maker's defense in its own antitrust court

battle with U.S. prosecutors, legal experts said.

A federal judge mostly sided with state and federal

antitrust enforcers in the blockbuster case on Monday that ruled

Google's search business was an illegal monopoly, but threw out

a claim by several U.S. states that one of Google's ad tools was

designed to give the company an advantage over Microsoft's ( MSFT )

Bing.

That piece could help Apple's ( AAPL ) defense in its own

anti-monopoly case, experts said. The ruling underscored Supreme

Court precedent that companies almost never have a "duty to

deal" with their rivals, said Herbert Hovenkamp, who teaches

antitrust at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law

School. "Any case, including Apple ( AAPL ), in which a duty to deal is a

major portion, is going to get a close look," he said. The

states had claimed Google thwarted competition by failing to

offer key features for rivals' ads through Search Ads 360, a

tool for managing marketing campaigns across multiple search

engines. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta agreed with Google that

it was not required to spur competition by accommodating its

rival. "Their claim requires grappling with a host of questions

that the court is ill-equipped to handle," the judge said. That

part of the ruling is good for defendants, said William Kovacic,

a professor at George Washington University Law School and

former commissioner of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. "It

also is a reminder that the case is hardly finished," he said,

adding that the case and appeals could take years. To be sure,

Apple ( AAPL ) could ultimately lose billions of dollars because of the

Google case if the judge bans the search juggernaut from paying

the iPhone maker and others to be the default search engine on

their devices. Mehta noted that Google had paid $26.3 billion in

2021 alone to ensure that its search engine is the default on

smartphones and browsers, and to keep its dominant market

share. But the Google ruling could give Apple ( AAPL ) a boost in its

case where the Justice Department says it hampered the

development of third-party apps and devices. The company last

week asked for the case to be dismissed, arguing that putting

reasonable limitations on third-party developers' access to its

technology did not amount to anti-competitive behavior, and that

forcing it to share technology with competitors would chill

innovation. The judge in Apple's ( AAPL ) case need not follow Mehta's

ruling, though Apple ( AAPL ) may try to use it to persuade him. The

Justice Department will have to show Apple's ( AAPL ) interactions with

developers were more like Google's payments to device makers,

Hovenkamp said. "In order to win, the government is going to

have to point to some kind of agreement, because then the

standard becomes more aggressive," he said.