What could Google’s monopoly ruling mean for you?

The tech world is digesting a potentially sensational ruling by a US judge that Google illegally monopolizes online search and related advertising.

It has taken four years to get to this point, and the inevitable appeal by Alphabet, which owns Google, means this legal process is likely to drag on for some time yet.

But the potential consequences of the judge’s decision are being weighed, ranging from fines to more complex remedies.

The US government specifically wants a “structural support solution” – so what would that look like?

The nuclear option would be to ask Google to break itself up into smaller pieces — a move US officials have not ruled out.

Google is more than just a search engine.

Look at Android, a company Google bought for $50m (£39.3m) in 2005 that now runs on most smartphones – or YouTube, a $1.65bn acquisition in 2006 that now generates many times that amount in revenue each year.

It could be argued that all of these things could still be part of Google, but the actual search engine should be spun off into a separate business.

That may be confusing for Alphabet executives, but as long as Google remains the default search engine on devices, the average consumer won’t notice the difference.

Another possible solution involves Google paying other companies to use its services.

The US says Google is currently paying companies like Apple more than $10 billion a year to be pre-installed as the default search engine on their devices or platforms.

The judge agreed.

The argument is that if Google doesn’t spend that money, big companies might be encouraged to develop their own search experiences.

Instead, Apple’s Safari browser will default to Google whenever you use it to search the web.

If the remediation significantly affects other companies’ ability to pay to use Google’s services, perhaps those companies will start forming a competitor.

However, here they would be up against Google’s incredibly strong customer recognition for search. Despite its own well-known brand, it’s hard to imagine telling someone to “Apple” something.

And a lot of people still download rival browsers on their devices, so if you’re using Chrome or Firefox on your iPhone, for example, you won’t notice if Safari’s search engine changes.

More conceivable is a sort of choice screen, where people opening the browser for the first time would be asked whether they want to use Google or an alternative like Microsoft’s Bing.

However, it’s harder to imagine if that would cause people to abandon Google en masse, for the simple reason that for most people, Google still works just fine.

Those of us with grey hair will remember Google as one of many search engines that emerged at the dawn of the Internet, with familiar rivals including Yahoo and Ask (formerly AskJeeves), and perhaps less familiar rivals including Lycos and AltaVista.

But over the next decade, Google not only became a dominant player in the market, it became part of the way we talk.

Although Microsoft launched its competitor Bing in 2009, nothing has been able to knock Google off its top spot.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified at Google’s trial, perhaps hoping a ruling like this could eventually help Bing grow.

Whatever happens next, past experience suggests it won’t happen quickly.

Back in 1999, Microsoft found itself in a very similar situation to Google today.

A US judge found the company had created a monopoly and a year later ordered it to be dissolved.

Microsoft appealed the decision, and in 2001 the original decision to split the company was overturned.

By the end of 2002, Microsoft reached a settlement with the US Department of Justice and was approved by a judge.

But several US states disagreed, and it wasn’t until 2004 – five years after the initial ruling – that the agreement was formally signed.