The trial begins in the US government’s antitrust case against Google

The largest U.S. competitive trial in more than two decades began Tuesday. Lawsuits filed against Google by the US government and dozens of states are being negotiated. This concerns the accusation that the internet company unfairly hinders competitors.

Google denies the allegations. The last time Windows giant Microsoft was in court in this corporate competition was in the late 1990s due to a competition lawsuit.

Among other things, the claim that Google’s agreements with browser developers such as Apple (Safari) and Mozilla (Firefox) harm competition should be negotiated. In its lawsuit, the Justice Department attacks the practice of setting Google’s search engine as the default. Mozilla and Apple receive money from Google for this. Kenneth Dintzer, the judicial authority argued in court that Google had “built a wall around its search engine monopoly” with this practice.

Google’s lawyer John Schmidtlein countered that it would be easy to replace the default search engine in browsers. However, users visited Google because they were satisfied with the quality of the search results. This also happens on Windows computers that have Microsoft’s Bing search engine set as the default.

Although 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.

Less extensive

In 2020, when Donald Trump was still president, the US Department of Justice and eleven states filed a competition lawsuit against Google. A second lawsuit by 38 other states followed two months later. The two lawsuits were merged into one case. The administration of Trump’s successor Joe Biden continued the process.

Google will face fewer allegations in the lawsuit than was determined in the original lawsuits. Judge Amit Mehta removed, among other things, the accusation that the company had harmed specialist providers such as Expedia or OpenTable through its conduct. He also did not allow any accusations related to the rules for device manufacturers when using the Android mobile operating system developed by Google.

(hah/sda/awp/dpa)