Achi news desk-
WASHINGTON –
Google’s prominence as an internet search engine is an illegal monopoly maintained by more than US$20 billion spent each year by the tech giant to shut out competition, US Justice Department lawyers argued that an antitrust lawsuit which has been significantly invested has closed.
Google, on the other hand, claims that its ubiquity flows from its excellence, and its ability to deliver results that customers are looking for.
The US government, a coalition of states and Google all made their closing arguments on Friday in the 10-week lawsuit before US District Judge Amit Mehta, who must now decide whether Google broke the law in maintaining monopoly status as search engine.
Much of the case, the biggest antitrust trial in more than two decades, has revolved around how much Google gets its strength from contracts it has in place with companies like Apple to make Google the default search engine loaded in advance on mobile phones and computers.
At trial, evidence showed that Google spends more than US$20 billion a year on such contracts. Justice Department lawyers have said the huge sum is a sign of how important it is for Google to make itself the default search engine and block competitors from gaining a foothold.
Google responds that customers could easily click away to other search engines if they wished, but that users always prefer Google. Companies like Apple testified in the trial that they partnered with Google because they considered its search engine to be better.
Google also argues that the government defines the search engine market too narrowly. Although it has a dominant position over other general search engines such as Bing and Yahoo, Google says it faces much more intense competition when users make targeted searches. For example, the tech giant says shoppers may be more likely to search for products on Amazon than Google, vacation planners may run their searches on AirBnB, and hungry diners may be more likely to look for a restaurant on Yelp .
And Google has said that social media companies such as Facebook and TikTok also present fierce competition.
During Friday’s arguments, Mehta questioned whether some of those other companies are actually in the same market. He said social media companies can generate advertising revenue by trying to deliver ads that appear to match a user’s interest. But he said Google has the ability to place ads in front of users in direct response to queries they submit.
“Only Google can directly see the stated intent,” Mehta said.
Google lawyer John Schmidtlein responded that social media companies have “lots and lots of information about your interests that I would say is just as powerful.”
The company has also argued that its market strength is thin as the internet continually reinvents itself. Earlier in the trial, he noted that many experts once considered it irreversible that Yahoo would always dominate search. Today, he said younger tech users sometimes think of Google as “Grandpa Google”.
Although Google’s search services are free to users, the company generates revenue from searches by selling ads that match a user’s search results.
Justice Department lawyer David Dahlquist said during Friday’s arguments that Google was able to increase its advertising revenue through growth in the number of queries submitted until around 2015 when query growth slowed and they needed to make more money on each search.
The government argues that Google’s search engine monopoly allows it to charge advertisers artificially higher prices, which ultimately pass on to consumers.
“Price increases should be limited by competition,” Dahlquist said. “The market should decide what the price increases are.”
Dahlquist said Google’s internal documents show that the company, unencumbered by any real competition, began changing its advertising algorithms to sometimes provide users with worse search ad results if it increased revenue.
Google lawyer Schmidtlein said the record shows its search ads have become more effective and more useful to users over time, increasing from a 10% to 30% click-through rate.
Mehta has not yet said when he will rule, although it is expected that it could take several months.
If it finds that Google has broken the law, it would then organize a “remedial” phase of the trial to decide what should be done to promote competition in the search engine market. The government has not yet said what kind of remedy it would seek.
