Google has exploited its dominance of the web search market to lock out rivals and smother innovation, the Department of Justice charged Tuesday on the opening of the largest US antitrust trial in 1 / 4 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 litigator.
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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 likely won’t 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 Mountain View, California-based company.
Top executives at Google and its corporate parent Alphabet Inc, as well as those from 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. Court documents also suggest that Eddy Cue, a high ranking Apple executive, might be called to the stand.
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The Justice Department filed its antitrust 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 through a form of payola, 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 favor 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.
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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 wanting issues up on the web.
The trial begins only a couple weeks after the twenty fifth anniversary of the primary funding within the firm — a $100,000 examine written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim that enabled Page and Sergey Brin to arrange store in a Silicon Valley storage.
Today, Google’s company mum or dad, Alphabet, is value $1.7 trillion and employs 182,000 individuals, with many of the cash coming from $224 billion in annual advert gross sales flowing by means of a community of digital companies anchored by a search engine that fields billions of queries a day.
The Justice Department’s antitrust case echoes the one it filed in opposition to Microsoft in 1998. Regulators then accused Microsoft of forcing laptop makers that relied on its dominant Windows working system to additionally characteristic Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — simply because the web was beginning to go mainstream. That bundling apply crushed competitors from the once-popular browser Netscape.
Several members of the Justice Department’s group within the Google case — together with lead Justice Department litigator Kenneth Dintzer — additionally labored on the Microsoft investigation.
Google may very well be hobbled if the trial ends in concessions that undercut its energy. One chance is that the corporate may very well be pressured to cease paying Apple and different corporations to make Google the default search engine on smartphones and computer systems.
Or the authorized battle might trigger Google to lose focus. That’s what occurred to Microsoft after its antitrust showdown with the Justice Department. Distracted, the software program big struggled to adapt to the influence of web search and smartphones. Google capitalised on that distraction to leap from its startup roots into an imposing powerhouse.
Source web site: www.hindustantimes.com
