Fortune reports:

Yesterday’s Google antitrust ruling was historic.

It may be kind of obvious to most people that a company handling 90% or more of search queries in the U.S. is a monopolist, but it’s nonetheless a big deal for a judge to rule as such—and to confirm that Google was therefore breaking antitrust rules when it shored up that outsized position by paying billions to Apple, Samsung and other players to make Google Search the default on their devices.

This, and U.S. judge Amit Mehta’s finding that Google’s monopolistic position has allowed it to charge excessive prices for search text ads, constitute the biggest outcome in U.S. tech antitrust history since the Microsoft ruling nearly quarter of a century ago. It will most likely have a big impact. But we are far from knowing what that impact will be, because Mehta is yet to lay out how Google must fix things—and this next part of the proceedings could come within six months, or it could be delayed for a long time by Google’s promised appeal.

So, for now, we have to play the conjecture game.

Given the fact that exclusive default-search payments are at the core of the case, it is quite possible that Mehta will demand their end. That would represent a hit to the bottom lines of the companies Google has been paying; Apple alone has been making as much as $20 billion a year out of this scheme. As my colleague Jason Del Rey wrote yesterday, Firefox-maker Mozilla in particular faces an existential threat in this scenario, as it is almost entirely funded by payments for making Google its default search engine.

But it’s very unclear how things might change for consumers as a result of yesterday’s ruling. [Continue reading…]