The US’s historic trial against Google, which is accused of abusing the dominant position of its famous search engine, opened on Tuesday in a federal court in Washington.
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This marathon trial, expected to last 10 weeks, is a crucial test for Joe Biden’s administration, which has established itself as a champion of competition law but is struggling to persuade the courts.
“This case is about the future of the Internet and the question of whether Google will ever face significant competition in search,” said prosecutor Kenneth Dintzer at the opening.
According to the US government, Google built its empire by illegally contracting with companies like Mozilla, Samsung and Apple so that its tool was installed by default on their smartphones and services.
This dominance of the Internet, and therefore digital advertising, has allowed Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to become one of the richest companies in the world.
The elements presented by the American government “will show that Google misled public opinion” and that it “hid documents that it knew violated antitrust law,” said Kenneth Dintzer.
According to him, Google pays around ten billion dollars every year to Apple and other device manufacturers and browsers to ensure that its search engine is displayed by default.
The prosecutor’s representative presented to the court a 2007 presentation by a Google engineer in which he touted the contracts that guaranteed the search engine’s standard installation and portrayed them as a “powerful strategic weapon.”
With the support of numerous witnesses, the California company will try to convince Federal Judge Amit Mehta that the Justice Department’s allegations are without merit.
“Google has been innovating and improving its search engine for decades,” emphasized John Schmidtlein, Google attorney, at the hearing. The US government is “ignoring this inescapable truth.”
“People use Google not because they have no other choice, but because they want to. “It’s easy to change the default search engine, we no longer live in the age of modems and CD-ROMs,” Kent Walker, Alphabet’s legal director, said before the trial began.
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“Darling of Silicon Valley”
It is the most significant antitrust lawsuit against a major technology company since the same agency attacked Microsoft over its dominance of the Windows operating system.
The Washington lawsuit against Microsoft, initiated in 1998, ended in a settlement in 2001 after an appeals court overturned a decision ordering the company to be split up.
At the time, Google was “the darling of Silicon Valley as a combative startup that offered an innovative way to search the emerging Internet,” the department’s complaint says. “That Google hasn’t existed for a long time.”
Dozens of American states, led by Colorado, have also joined the fight. Although the judge rejected some of their arguments before the trial – including allegations that Google illegally downgraded sites like Yelp and Expedia.
The search engine represents 90% of this market in the United States and worldwide, especially thanks to search on smartphones, mainly iPhones (Apple) and Android phones (Google).
Google search activity, or revenue from SEO and advertising based on search results, amounted to $42.6 billion in 2022, or 56% of Alphabet’s revenue.
Its competitors like Bing (Microsoft) and DuckDuckGo have never managed to gain much traction.
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Google is at risk. If Amit Mehta decides to move to the US in a few months, there is a risk that the group will be forced to divest from certain activities, change its methods or forego signing installation contracts.
In Europe, fines totaling more than 8.2 billion euros have already been imposed for various violations of competition law, but some of these decisions are pending appeal.
There is also a lot at stake for Joe Biden’s government. The lawsuits were launched in 2020 by Donald Trump’s administration, but the Democratic president has made a point of challenging the tech giants, so far without much impact.
In July, the US competition authority FTC suspended its proceedings to block Microsoft’s takeover of video game maker Activision Blizzard after a series of legal setbacks.
The Justice Department also filed another complaint against Google in January over its advertising business. The trial could take place next year.