The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and a group of state attorneys-general have taken technology giant Google to court in Washington, accusing it of exploiting its dominance of the internet search market to lock out competitors and prevent innovation.
It’s the biggest US antitrust case in a quarter of a century, and Google is fighting to protect its stranglehold on around 90 per cent of the global internet search business.
With the civil trial now into its second week, let’s take a look at what both sides’ arguments have been, and what could happen next.
The US government claims Google has rigged the market in its favour by signing deals to make its search engine the default on many different devices, thereby making competition more difficult.
The DOJ filed its lawsuit against Google in 2020, and alleged the company had used its internet search dominance to gain an unfair advantage. It called Google “the gatekeeper of the internet”, and “a monopolist”.
Government lawyers say Google spends billions of dollars each year to be the default search engine on web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.
Mr Dintzer said Google was also dominant because of the billions of searches it processed each day, which are used to improve future searches and create advantages over rivals.
He also cited an internal Google document that called its arrangements with device makers and telecommunications companies an “Achilles Heel” for rival search engines.
Government lawyers have also claimed tactics used by Google have prevented Apple from developing a search engine of its own.
Google says it dominates the search market because its products are better than those of its competitors. It also argues that users can switch the default search engine on their devices relatively easily.
The trial’s first witness was Google chief economist Hal Varian.
The DOJ’s Mr Dintzer produced a 2003 memo in which Mr Varian had urged Google employees to be cautious about how they discussed competition with Microsoft.
“We should be careful about what we say in both public and private,” the memo said, adding that references to things like “cutting off their air supply” should be avoided.
The US DOJ’s lawsuit against Google is likely to have major implications for Big Tech, which has been accused of crushing or buying up competition.
The last major Big Tech antitrust trial in the US was against Microsoft in 1998, when the US government accused the company of forcing computer manufacturers which relied on its popular Windows operating system to also use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser.
In that case, Microsoft was found to have acted unlawfully, but an appeals court partially overturned the judgement and the two parties reached a settlement in which Microsoft agreed to change some of its practices.
(ABC)
