WASHINGTON - The U.S. Justice Department is charging in court that Google has exploited its dominance of the internet search market to lock out competitors and smother innovation. The court case begins Sept. 12 and is the biggest antitrust trial in 25 years.
“This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition,” said Kenneth Dintzer, DoJ's lead lawyer.
Over the next 10 weeks, federal lawyers and state attorneys general will try to prove Google rigged the market in its favor by locking its search engine in as the default choice in a plethora of places and devices.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta likely won’t issue a ruling until next year. If the judge decides Google broke the law, another trial will decide what steps should be taken to rein in the California-based company.
Google executive, and corporate parent Alphabet Inc., as well as other powerful technology companies, are expected to testify. Among them is likely to be Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Google co-founder Larry Page four years ago.
DoJ filed its antitrust lawsuit against Google nearly three years ago. Fed lawyers allege Google protects its franchise through a form of payola, shelling out more than $10B annually to be the default search engine on the iPhone and web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.
Dintzer said Google “began weaponizing defaults” more than 15 years ago and cited an internal Google document calling its arrangements an “Achilles Heel” for rival search engines offered by Yahoo and MSN.
Google counters that it faces a wide range of competition despite commanding about 90% of the internet search market. From Google’s perspective, perpetual improvements to its search engine explain why people almost reflexively keep coming back to it, a habit that long ago made “Googling” synonymous with looking things up on the internet.
The trial begins just a couple weeks after the 25th anniversary of the first investment in the company - a $100,000 check written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim that enabled Page and Sergey Brin to set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.
Today, Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, is worth $1.7T and employs 182,000 people, with most of the money coming from $224B in annual ad sales flowing through a network of digital services anchored by a search engine that fields billions of queries a day. (The AP 09/12/23)
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