process
US government antitrust lawsuit against Google
Google has to face a competition case in court. photo
© Peter Morgan/AP
Google is accused of unfairly hindering other competitors. The process that has now begun is the largest US competition process in more than 20 years.
The largest US competition process in more than 20 years has begun. Lawsuits brought by the US government and dozens of states against are being negotiated Google. This is about the accusation that the Internet company is unfairly hindering competitors. Google denies the allegations. The last time the Windows giant Microsoft was in court in this corporate league was in the late 1990s because of a competition lawsuit.
Among other things, the allegation that Google’s agreements with browser developers such as Apple (Safari) and Mozilla (Firefox) harm competition is to be negotiated. In its lawsuit, the Justice Department is attacking the practice of setting Google’s search engine as the default. Mozilla and Apple receive money from Google for this. Kenneth Dintzer argued for the justice department in the courtroom that Google had “created a wall around its search engine monopoly” with this practice.
Lawyer: Google simply delivers better search results
Google’s lawyer John Schmidtlein countered that it would be easy to replace the default search engine in browsers. However, users accessed Google because they were satisfied with the quality of the search results. This also happens on Windows computers on which Microsoft’s Bing search engine is preset as the default.
While the Justice Department points out that Google has a 90 percent market share in Internet searches, the company counters in court documents that this calculation does not take into account specialized search engines such as Yelp for restaurants or Expedia for travel. While Donald Trump was still president, the US Department of Justice and eleven states filed a competition lawsuit against Google in 2020. A second lawsuit by 38 other states followed two months later. The two lawsuits were consolidated into one case. The government of Trump’s successor Joe Biden continued the process.
Judge deletes further allegations
Google will have to face fewer allegations in the process than stipulated in the original lawsuits. Among other things, judge Amit Mehta ruled out the allegation that the company had harmed specialized providers such as Expedia or OpenTable through its behavior. He also did not allow allegations in connection with the rules for device manufacturers when using the Android mobile operating system developed by Google.