It is a landmark case years in the making and cuts to the heart of a long-simmering question: Did today’s tech giants become dominant by breaking the law?
The Justice Department has spent three years over two presidential administrations building the case that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. To defend itself, Google has enlisted hundreds of employees and three powerful law firms and spent millions of dollars on legal fees and lobbyists.
The stakes are particularly high for Google, the Silicon Valley company founded in 1998, which grew into a $US1.7 trillion giant by becoming the first place people turned to online to search the web. The government has said in its complaint that it wants Google to change its monopolistic business practices, potentially pay damages and restructure itself.
Judge Amit P. Mehta, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, is presiding over the trial, which will not have a jury, and he will issue the final ruling. Kenneth Dintzer, a 30-year veteran litigator for the Justice Department, will lead the government’s arguments in the courtroom, while John E. Schmidtlein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly, will do the same for Google.
Rivals have long accused Google of brandishing its power in search to suppress competitors’ links to travel, restaurant reviews and maps, while giving greater prominence to its own content. Those complaints brought scrutiny from regulators, although little action was taken. Google’s actions had harmed consumers and stifled competition, the agency said, and could affect the future technological landscape as the company positioned itself to control “emerging channels” for search distribution. The agency added that Google had behaved similarly to Microsoft in the 1990s, when the software giant made its own web browser the default on the Windows operating system, crushing competitors.
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