Google has exploited its dominance of the internet search market to lock out competitors and smother innovation, the Department of Justice said at the opening of the biggest US anti-trust trial in a quarter of a century.
“This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition,″ said Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Department’s lead lawyer.
Over the next 10 weeks, federal lawyers and state attorneys general will try to prove Google rigged the market in its favour by locking its search engine in as the default choice in a plethora of places and devices.
US District Judge Amit Mehta is unlikely to issue a ruling until early next year. If he decides Google broke the law, another trial will decide what steps should be taken to rein in the California-based company.
Top executives at Google and its corporate parent Alphabet, as well as those from other powerful technology companies are expected to testify.
Among them is likely to be Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Google co-founder Larry Page four years ago. Court documents also suggest that Eddy Cue, a high-ranking Apple executive, might be called to give evidence.
The Justice Department filed its anti-trust lawsuit against Google nearly three years ago during the Trump administration, charging that the company has used its internet search dominance to gain an unfair advantage against competitors.
Government lawyers allege that Google protects its franchise by shelling out billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on the iPhone and on web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.
Regulators also charge that Google has illegally rigged the market in its favour by requiring its search engine to be bundled with its Android software for smartphones if the device manufacturers want full access to the Android app store.
Google counters that it faces a wide range of competition despite commanding about 90% of the internet search market. Its rivals, Google argues, range from search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing to websites like Amazon and Yelp, where consumers can post questions about what to buy or where to go.
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 of weeks after the 25th anniversary of the first investment in the company — a 100,000 dollar cheque written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim that enabled Mr Page and Sergey Brin to set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.
Today, Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, is worth 1.7 trillion dollars and employs 182,000 people, with most of the money coming from 224 billion in annual ad sales flowing through a network of digital services anchored by a search engine that fields billions of queries a day.
The Justice Department’s anti-trust case echoes the one it filed against Microsoft in 1998.
Regulators then accused Microsoft of forcing computer makers that relied on its dominant Windows operating system to also feature Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — just as the internet was starting to go mainstream. That bundling practice crushed competition from the once-popular browser Netscape.
Several members of the Justice Department’s team in the Google case — including lead Justice Department litigator Kenneth Dintzer — also worked on the Microsoft investigation.
