Receive free Google LLC updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Google LLC news every morning.
Google and the US government will come face to face in a Washington courtroom on Tuesday to kick off the most significant antitrust monopoly trial in 25 years.
The Department of Justice and the tech group are expected to deliver opening statements in a case accusing Google of dominating internet search via anti-competitive agreements.
It is the most high-profile monopoly trial since the DoJ accused Microsoft in the 1990s of seeking to quash then-pioneering web browser Netscape with its Windows dominance.
Almost three decades later, a new generation of progressive officials appointed by President Joe Biden — including Jonathan Kanter, the head of the DoJ’s antitrust unit — have vowed to rein in Big Tech. They argue that insufficient legal challenges in recent decades have allowed anti-competitive conduct to proliferate across the US economy.
Kanter inherited the Google case from the Trump administration, which first filed it in 2020. It will mark the biggest test for the DoJ’s tougher enforcement stance against Big Tech.
“The case against Google is the largest monopolisation case since Microsoft,” said Sean Sullivan, professor at the Iowa university College of Law. It could be the kind of landmark trial that produces “judicial opinions that provide new or better ways of understanding and applying antitrust law”.
The DoJ’s complaint alleged Google sidelined competitors by paying wireless carriers, browser developers and device manufacturers billions of dollars via deals that ensure its search engine features prominently on mobile phones and computers.
As a result, Google came to dominate the market, having in recent years “accounted for nearly 90 per cent of all general-search-engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 per cent of queries on mobile devices”, according to the DoJ’s complaint.
Google has argued that it offers a good product that the public chooses to use. It has also said that the agreements in question are mainly set by its counterparts, companies such as Apple or Samsung, and that other players can join the bidding process.
“It is not enough for the DoJ to show that Google is very large or that its competitors have struggled to make inroads against it,” Sullivan said. “The government bears the burden of showing that Google has maintained a monopoly position through anti-competitive conduct.”
Witness lists have not yet been set for the bench trial, which is expected to last about 10 weeks, but the DoJ is expected to call on companies involved in Google’s deals. Apple failed to stop three of its top executives from being called to testify, including Eddy Cue, head of its services business. Other tech executives including Google chief executive Sundar Pichai are also expected to appear.
The DoJ in January filed a separate antitrust lawsuit against Google for dominance in the digital advertising market, one of multiple cases that antitrust enforcers in the Biden administration have brought in an effort to counter Big Tech.
Read the full article here