Sun 11 September 2022:
The US justice jepartment told a federal judge that Google is paying billions of dollars annually to illegally remain the top search engine.
Describing the payments as “enormous numbers,” Department of Justice attorney Kenneth Dintzer said telecom giants and companies being paid include Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co.
During a hearing in Washington, which marked the first major face-off in the case, Dintzer told Judge Amit Mehta “Google invests billions in defaults, knowing people won’t change them.”
“They are buying default exclusivity because defaults matter a lot,” he added.
Alleging the company has sought to maintain its online search monopoly in violation of antitrust laws, Google’s contracts form the basis of the DOJ’s landmark antitrust lawsuit.
Before Facebook’s parent company Meta, state attorneys general are pursuing a parallel antitrust suit against the search giant.
The federal government’s first major effort to rein in the power of the tech giants was filed in the waning days of the Trump administration.
Hosting a roundtable with experts to explore the harm major tech platforms can wreak on the economy and children’s health, the White House outlined six principles to reform Big Tech platforms.
According to Google’s attorney John Schmidtlein, the company faces more competition from TikTok, Meta Platforms and Amazon than Microsoft.
“You don’t have to go to Google to shop on Amazon. You don’t have to go to Google to buy plane tickets on Expedia,” he said.
Highlighting that Google controls both the most popular browser and the second-most popular mobile operating system, the DOJ said having fresh data on user search queries is key to a search engine’s success.
Pointing out its default contracts have hemmed in potential rivals, DOJ’s Dintzer focused on the mechanics of Google’s search engine during his presentation.
Allowing it to prevent rivals from gaining the scale that would be needed to challenge its search engine, Google’s contracts make it the “gateway” by which most people find websites on the internet, according to Dintzer.
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