The case about “the future of the internet” is underway, with Google arguing the US was wrong to say the search and advertising giant broke the law to hold onto its massive market share.
Google has exploited its dominance of the internet search market to lock out competitors and smother innovation, the Department of Justice said at the opening of“This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition,” said Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Department’s lead litigator.AP
The Justice Department filed its antitrust lawsuit 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 Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.
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.Credit:Google “began weaponizing defaults” more than 15 years ago, Dintzer said, citing an internal Google document calling its arrangements an “Achilles Heel” for rival search engines offered by Yahoo and MSN.
And Dintzer said Google deleted documents to keep them out of court proceedings and sought to hide others under attorney-client privilege. While questioning Google chief economist Hal Varian – the trial’s first witness – 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. “We should be careful about what we say in both public and private,” Varian wrote. References to “cutting off their air supply” and similar comments, for instance, “should be avoided.
Today, Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, is worth $US1.7 trillion and employs 182,000 people, with most of the money coming from $US224 billion in annual ad sales flowing through a network of digital services anchored by a search engine that fields billions of queries a day.
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