The Department of Justice's landmark antitrust case against Google started this week in court marking the beginning of a trial that will last for months and potentially revolutionize the world of technology in the process.
What is at stake is Google's search business. The Justice Department says Google has violated antitrust laws by maintaining its top spot in search, while the tech giant maintains that it naturally maintains its dominance by offering consumers a superior product.
The Justice Department filed the civil antitrust lawsuit against Google in late 2020 after examining the company's business for more than a year.
“If the government does not enforce antitrust laws to allow competition, we will miss the next wave of innovation,” said then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen. At that moment. "If that happens, Americans may never see the 'next Google.'"
A large coalition of state attorneys general also filed their own parallel lawsuit against Google, but Judge Amit Mehta decided that lawsuit It's not that solid overall. , that would allow them to go to court with their own complaints about Google's search ranking practices.
The current case against Google, focused on its search business, is separate from another federal antitrust lawsuit filed earlier this year. In that lawsuit, the Justice Department maintains that Google used “anticompetitive, exclusionary and illegal means” to neutralize threats to its digital advertising empire.
On Tuesday, Justice Department attorney Kenneth Dintzer set the stakes for the trial, which is the first major tech antitrust trial since Microsoft's historic reckoning in the late 90s. "This case is about the future." of the Internet and whether Google's search engine will ever have meaningful competition," Dintzer said.
At the beginning of the trial, the government focused its attention on the Google agreements with phone makers (most notably Apple) giving their search product top billing in new devices. Dintzer argued that by paying $10 billion annually for those deals, Google can maintain and even expand its status as the leading search engine.
"This feedback loop has been spinning for more than 12 years," he said. "And it always benefits Google."
Google lawyer John Schmidtlein rejected that characterization, hinting at the argument we'll likely see the company make in the coming weeks.
"Users today have more search options and more ways to access information online than ever before," Schmidtlein said. He pointed to traditional competitors such as Microsoft's Bing search engine, but also to a wide range of search-enabled Internet services, including Amazon, Expedia and DoorDash, with which Google will argue it competes.
Google has already sown the seeds of this same line of defense. Last year, Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said more and more young people are turning to TikTok to search information instead of Google Search, citing internal investigations.
"In our studies, about 40% of young people, when they're looking for a place to have lunch, they don't go to Google Maps or Search," Raghavan said. "They go to TikTok or Instagram."
In the coming months, Google's fate will be decided by US District Judge Amit Mehta and not a jury. We're a long way from that decision, but the company could face massive fines or even an order to sell parts of its existing business.
If the Justice Department wins, the trial could remodel the future of Google's digital empire. But other technology companies that came to dominate online markets in the last decade are also watching the process closely. If the government fails in this attempt to hold an iconic Silicon Valley giant accountable, Big Tech is likely to continue its aggressive, unfettered growth trajectory undeterred.
If the Justice Department holds firm, the next decade could play out very differently than we've seen before. Signs of that industry-wide reckoning could cripple incumbents and open market space for upstarts to define the next era of the Internet, wresting the future from the clutches of entrenched tech titans.
