U.S. antitrust trial against Google, the biggest since Microsoft, begins today

The largest U.S. antitrust trial in 25 years kicked off on Tuesday as the Justice Department seeks to rein in Google’s dominance of the search market, challenging a product that has become ubiquitous over the past two decades.

“This case is about the future of the Internet and whether Google’s search engine will face meaningful competition,” said Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Department’s chief litigation attorney. Over the next 10 weeks, federal lawyers and state attorneys general will try to prove that Google manipulated the market in its favor by locking its search engine into the default choice for so many places and devices. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta may not rule until early next year. If he decides Google violated the law, another trial will determine what steps should be taken to rein in the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

Executives from Google, its parent Alphabet Inc. and other powerful technology companies are expected to testify. That could include Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Google co-founder Larry Page four years ago. Court documents also show that senior Apple executive Eddie Cue may be subpoenaed to appear in court.

“User data is oxygen”

The Ministry of Justice submitted its antitrust litigation About three years ago, during the Trump administration, the U.S. government filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of using its dominance of Internet search to gain an unfair advantage against rivals. (Current case vs. litigation The federal government filed a lawsuit in January this year, accusing Google of having a monopoly in online advertising. )

Government lawyers claim Google pays to protect its franchise, spending billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine on iPhones and web browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

“Google pays more than $10 billion a year for these privileged positions,” Dingze said. “Google’s contract ensures that competitors cannot match search quality ad monetization, especially on mobile,” Dingze said. “Through this feedback loop, this wheel has been turning for more than 12 years. It was always going to be Google’s advantage.”

Dingze said the more searches Google processes, the more data it collects, which can be used to improve future searches and give it an even greater advantage over its competitors. “User data is the oxygen of search engines,” he said. Because of its market dominance, “Google’s search and advertising products are better than its competitors could hope to be.” That’s why Google spends so much money to make its search engine the default option in products from Apple and other companies, he said.

Dingze said Google “started to weaponize default settings” 15 years ago, citing an internal Google document that said the arrangement was the “Achilles’ heel” of rival search engines offered by Yahoo and MSN. He also accused Google of forcing Apple to give its search engine a default position on its devices as a condition of receiving a share of revenue. “This is not a negotiation,” Dingze said. “That’s what Google says: Take it or leave it.”

The lawsuits argued that the company’s anticompetitive tactics prevented Apple from developing its own search engine.

Antitrust groups said the outcome of the trial could affect the development of next-generation technologies, including artificial intelligence tools.

Matt Stoller, research director of the American Economic Freedom Project, said: “The primary way AI is deployed today is to find answers on the Internet, so if it can maintain its monopoly, Google will control the future of AI. .” a statement. “If Judge Amit Mehta rules that Google is not a monopoly, the future will belong to all of us.”

Allegation of deletion of files

Dinzel said Google removed some documents to prevent them from being used in court proceedings and attempted to use attorney-client privilege to hide others. “They’ve been destroying documents for years,” Dingze said. “Your honor, they shut down history so they could rewrite it in this courtroom.”

Google counters that despite controlling about 90% of the Internet search market, it still faces widespread competition.

“People use Google because it’s helpful,” the tech company wrote in a blog post last weekwhich noted that rivals including Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo paid Apple to use the feature in Safari and change the default in Google’s favor with just two clicks set up.

Google sees its competition as not just other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, but also sites like Amazon and Yelp, where consumers can post questions about what to buy or where to go. “There are many ways users access the web beyond the default search engine, and people use them all the time,” said attorney John Schmidtlein, a partner at law firm Williams & Connolly, which represents Google.

From Google’s perspective, the constant improvement of its search engine explains why people keep returning to it almost reflexively, a habit that long ago made “Googling” synonymous with finding things on the Internet. For example, Schmitling said the tweaks make Google search better than its main competitor, Bing. “At every critical moment,” he said, “they were beaten in the market.”

The trial begins just weeks after the 25th anniversary of the company’s first investment — a $100,000 check written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim that made Larry Page Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage. Today, Google parent Alphabet is worth $1.7 trillion and has 182,000 employees, much of it funded by $224 billion in annual ad sales that flow through a network of search-engine-based digital services that are processed every day Billions of queries.

The Justice Department’s antitrust case echoes a case filed against Microsoft in 1998. Regulators at the time accused Microsoft of forcing computer makers that relied on its dominant Windows operating system to also adopt Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, which is used to access the Internet. Bundling Explorer crushed competition from the once-popular rival browser Netscape just as the Internet was starting to go mainstream.

Several members of the Justice Department’s Google case team, including Dintzer, are also involved in the Microsoft investigation. Google could be in trouble if the trial ends with concessions that weaken it. One possibility is that the company could be forced to stop paying Apple and others to make Google the default search engine on smartphones and computers.

Even if the trial ends in Google’s favor, a protracted legal battle could cause Google to lose focus on its business. That’s what happened to Microsoft after its antitrust showdown with the Justice Department. The software giant is distracted and struggling to adapt to the impact of Internet search and smartphones.Google uses this disruption to get rid of Its startups have roots in a strong company.

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