US Antitrust Trial Focuses on Google’s Search Engine Supremacy

The U.S. government is targeting Google’s all-pervasive search engine, which has established itself as the primary access point to the internet, despite its seemingly invincible status.

The legal onslaught will go into full effect Tuesday in a Washington, DC, federal courtroom, the battleground for the biggest US antitrust trial since regulators went after Microsoft and its dominance of personal computer software a quarter-century ago.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s 10-week trial is expected to include potentially revealing testimony from top executives at Google and its parent company, Alphabet, as well as other powerful tech companies. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Google founder Larry Page in 2019, is one of the most prominent witnesses likely to testify. Court documents also indicate that one of Apple’s top executives, Eddy Cue, may be called to the stand.

The lawsuit against Google mirrors the lawsuit against Microsoft in many ways, including its existential threat to a well-known tech giant whose products are trusted by billions of people.

The trial is scheduled to continue until the end of November before the first phase ends, after which a new trial and arguments are expected. Mehta is expected to give a decision only at the beginning of next year. If he decides that Google has broken the law, it will launch a new trial to determine what steps should be taken to rein in the Mountain View, Calif., company.

While Google products such as the Chrome browser, Gmail, YouTube and web maps are all hugely popular, none have become as essential — or as valuable — as Page and the Internet search engine invented by Stanford University graduate student Sergey Brin. In the late 1990s.

The experiment begins just a couple of weeks after 25 years since the company’s first investment — a $100,000 check written by Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim that allowed Page and Brin to set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.

Today, Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., is worth $1.7 trillion and employs 182,000 people. Most of the money comes from the $224 billion in annual advertising sales that flow through a network of digital services anchored by a search engine that sends billions of queries a day.

Google could find itself in a bind if the antitrust lawsuit culminates in concessions that undermine its power. One possibility is that the company will have to stop paying Apple and other companies to make Google the default search engine on smartphones and computers.

Or a legal battle could force Google to focus. That’s what happened to Microsoft after its antitrust dispute with the Justice Department: The software giant was distracted as it struggled to adapt to the effects of Internet search and smartphones. Google capitalized on this disruption to jump from its startup roots to an impressive powerhouse.

Nearly three years after an antitrust lawsuit was filed under the Trump administration, U.S. Justice Department lawyers are trying to prove that Google abused the power of its search engine to stifle competition in ways that stifled innovation. According to critics, the quality of search results has also decreased when Google used its engine to sell ads and promote its own products, such as Google’s restaurant reviews instead of Yelp’s.

Dozens of state attorneys general, led by Colorado, have waded into the fray and have a chance to prove that Google has turned into an illegal monopoly that hurts consumers.

The core of the Justice Department’s argument boils down to its claim that Google’s search engine has become like the digital air that almost everyone breathes and that it needs to be cleaned because the company’s tactics have polluted the atmosphere.

Google’s extensive legal team is expected to counter that the company has never stopped improving its search engine and fulfilling its original mission of organizing the world’s information and making it universally available to anyone with an Internet connection. From Google’s point of view, continuous improvements explain why most people almost reflexively gravitate to its search engine, which has long since made “Googling” synonymous with finding things.

Despite controlling about 90 percent of the Internet search market, Google says it faces extensive competition, from other search engines like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo to websites like Amazon and Yelp, where people search for questions about what to buy or where. eat.

The Justice Department claims that Google’s claim that it dominates the market by providing the best search engine is a canard. They argue that Google is protecting its franchise with a form of payola, paying billions of dollars each year to be the default search engine on iPhones and web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Regulators also claim that Google has illegally rigged the market in its favor by requiring its search engine to bundle its Android software with smartphones if device makers want full access to the Android app store.

By locking Google as the default search engine in so many places, the Justice Department claims the company has made it harder for people to find the best results as quickly as possible.

Regulators argue that the company’s agreements ensure Google has automatic access to the billions of queries that provide data to its search engine, while denying Bing and DuckDuckGo access to data that could help them improve their results.

The tactic has created a toxic situation that allows Google to cram more ads at the top of its search results, boosting its profits and Alphabet’s stock price, according to the Justice Department. This practice requires consumers to dig ever deeper to answer their questions, which regulators say could be avoided if competing services could collect as much data as Google through their lock-in agreements.

Google insists that consumers can easily change their default settings to another search engine.

The company also claims it faces competition from emerging technology: Microsoft, for example, is baking artificial intelligence from its business partner Open AI into its Bing search engine. The move in early February prompted Google to start equipping its search engine with artificial intelligence-based results as well – a sign that the competition is still thriving, according to the company.