This week, Google will face its largest-ever legal challenge in a Washington court as it battles US government allegations that it engaged in illegal activity to establish its overwhelming dominance of internet search.
Google is going to attempt to convince a federal judge that the Department of Justice’s historic case is unfounded after ten weeks of testimony from over a hundred witnesses.
This trial is the largest US antitrust action against a major computer corporation since the department that brought the Microsoft lawsuit concerning Windows’ dominance more than twenty years ago.
John Lopatka from Pennsylvania State’s Law School stated, “Technology has changed a lot in the last 20 years, so the outcome of this case will have a big impact on how tech platforms work in the future.”
The government’s main claim in the Google case is that the company broke the law by making exclusive deals with gadget makers, cell operators, as well as other businesses that made it impossible for competitors to compete.
By giving Apple, Samsung, or companies like T-Mobile or AT&T billions of dollars every single year, Google reportedly made sure that its search engine would be the default on phones as well as web browsers, ensuring its success and hurting rivals.
In its case, the Department of Justice stated that “Google was the darling of Silicon Valley when it was a scrappy start-up with a new way to search the new internet. That Google doesn’t exist anymore.”
The people who are said to be hurt the most by this case are Google’s competitors, like Microsoft’s Bing as well as DuckDuckGo, which haven’t been able to get a big share of the market as of yet.
Google continues to be the most popular search engine in the world, controlling 90% of the market both domestically and internationally. A large portion of this market share comes from mobile usage on iPhones and Android-powered phones, which are controlled by Google.
