Google has exploited its dominance of the internet search market to lock out competitors and smother innovation, the Department of Justice said Tuesday at the opening of the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century.
B次元官网网址淭his case is about the future of the internet and whether GoogleB次元官网网址檚 search engine will ever face meaningful competition,B次元官网网址� said Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice DepartmentB次元官网网址檚 lead litigator.
Over the next 10 weeks, federal lawyers and state attorneys general will try to prove Google rigged the market in its favor by locking in its search engine as the default choice in a plethora of places and devices. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta likely wonB次元官网网址檛 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.
The Justice Department filed its against Google nearly three years ago during the Trump administration, alleging that the company has used its internet search dominance to gain an unfair advantage against competitors. Government lawyers say 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 AppleB次元官网网址檚 Safari and MozillaB次元官网网址檚 Firefox.
B次元官网网址淕oogle pays more than $10 billion per year for these privileged positions,B次元官网网址橞次元官网网址� Dintzer said.
B次元官网网址淕oogleB次元官网网址檚 contracts ensure that rivals cannot match the search quality ad monetization, especially on phones,B次元官网网址� he said. B次元官网网址淭hrough this feedback loop, this wheel has been turning for more than 12 years. It always turns to GoogleB次元官网网址檚 advantage.B次元官网网址�
Google counters that it faces a wide range of competition despite commanding about 90% of the internet search market. Its rivals, the company argues, range from search engines such as MicrosoftB次元官网网址檚 Bing to websites like Amazon and Yelp, where consumers can post questions about what to buy or where to go. B次元官网网址淭here are lots of way users access the web other than default search engines, and people use them all the time,B次元官网网址橞次元官网网址� said attorney John Schmidtlein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly which is representing Google.
But the more searches Google processes, the more data it collects, data that can be used to improve future searches and give it an even bigger advantage over its rivals, Dintzer said. B次元官网网址淯ser data is the oxygen for a search engine,B次元官网网址� he said. Because of its market dominance, B次元官网网址淕oogle search and ad products are better than its rivals can hope to be.B次元官网网址�
That is why, he said, Google pays so much for its search engine to be the default option on products from Apple and other companies.
Google B次元官网网址渂egan weaponizing defaultsB次元官网网址� more than 15 years ago, Dintzer said, citing an internal Google document calling its arrangements an B次元官网网址淎chilles HeelB次元官网网址� for rival search engines offered by Yahoo and MSN.
He also alleged that Google strong-armed Apple into giving its search engine a default position on its devices as a condition for revenue sharing. B次元官网网址淭his is not a negotiation,B次元官网网址� Dintzer said. B次元官网网址淭his is Google saying: Take it or leave it.B次元官网网址�
Litigators argue the companyB次元官网网址檚 anticompetitive tactics prevented Apple from developing a search engine of its own.
And Dintzer said Google deleted documents to keep them out of court proceedings and sought to hide others under attorney-client privilege.
B次元官网网址淭hey destroyed documents for years,B次元官网网址橞次元官网网址� Dintzer said. B次元官网网址淭hey turned history off, your honor, so they could rewrite it in this court.B次元官网网址橞次元官网网址�
While questioning Google chief economist Hal Varian B次元官网网址� the trialB次元官网网址檚 first witness B次元官网网址� Dintzer produced a July 2003 memo in which Varian urged Google employees to be cautious about how they discussed competition with Microsoft, lest they raise antitrust concerns. B次元官网网址淲e should be careful about what we say in both public and private,B次元官网网址橞次元官网网址� Varian wrote. References to B次元官网网址渃utting off their air supplyB次元官网网址橞次元官网网址� and similar comments, for instance, B次元官网网址渟hould be avoided.B次元官网网址橞次元官网网址�
From GoogleB次元官网网址檚 perspective, perpetual improvements to its search engine explain why people almost reflexively keep coming back to it, a habit that long ago made B次元官网网址淕ooglingB次元官网网址� synonymous with looking things up on the internet. Schmidtlein said GoogleB次元官网网址檚 tweaks simply made its search better than key rival Bing. B次元官网网址淎t every critical juncture,B次元官网网址� he said, B次元官网网址渢hey were beaten in the market.B次元官网网址�
The trial begins just a couple weeks after the 25th anniversary of the first investment in Google B次元官网网址� a $100,000 check written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim that enabled Page and Sergey Brin to set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.
Today, GoogleB次元官网网址檚 corporate parent, Alphabet, is worth $1.7 trillion 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 DepartmentB次元官网网址檚 antitrust 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 MicrosoftB次元官网网址檚 Internet Explorer B次元官网网址� 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 DepartmentB次元官网网址檚 team in the Google case B次元官网网址� including Dintzer B次元官网网址� also worked on the Microsoft investigation.
Google could be hobbled if the trial ends in concessions that undercut its power. One possibility is that the company could be forced to stop paying Apple and other companies to make Google the default search engine on smartphones and computers.
Or the legal battle could cause Google to lose focus. ThatB次元官网网址檚 what happened to Microsoft after its antitrust showdown with the Justice Department. Distracted, the software giant struggled to adapt to the impact of internet search and smartphones. Google capitalized on that distraction to leap from
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