Google gave a sneak peek of its defense strategy on Friday before its trial in District of Columbia District Court starts the next week in response to allegations of illegal monopolization by the US government.
After the Department of Justice successfully argued against Microsoft, the trial is the first significant antitrust case involving technology in the United States in decades.
had broken the law on antitrust more than 20 years prior.
In this case, the DOJ and a group of state attorneys general claim that Google employed exclusive agreements to prevent competitors from accessing the general search market, including agreements with Apple and phone manufacturers who use its Android operating system. In order to allegedly limit advertising expenditure to its own services, the states will also contend that Google failed to make its search advertising tool compatible with Microsoft’s Bing.
According to Google, the government’s argument is “deeply flawed.” The company’s head of global affairs, Kent Walker, outlined the main points of its case in a blog post on Friday. Here they are:
The variety of services that provide search tools shows that Google’s distribution agreements haven’t hurt competition for search. Walker mentions websites like Reddit, Instagram, Amazon, and TikTok.
— a bigger group than direct rivals the government believes to be a part of the relevant market, such as Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo.
In the first place, default search engines are chosen by browser and device manufacturers, and Google was chosen by them “based on the quality of our products,” according to Walker. He cited Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, who said that Google’s search engine is “the best” in 2018.
According to Walker, Google is not the only business that pays for prominent placement on browsers. Additionally, Yahoo and Bing pay to be highlighted in Apple’s Safari.
According to Walker, Google’s payments to carriers and device manufacturers to promote its search engine and browser are merely marketing efforts, much like a cereal company pays a store to display its boxes at eye level on the shelf.
If users would rather use a different provider, they may easily change the default search engine on their devices. According to Google, changing the default on Safari’s desktop version only requires two clicks, and it only requires a couple more on mobile devices. Walker claimed that in 2014, when many Mozilla users changed their default search engine from Yahoo to Google, customers demonstrated their readiness to do this.
According to Walker, Google would need to put Microsoft’s needs ahead of its own in order to make its search ad tool as interoperable as states appear to think it should be. “American law doesn’t require you to put the preferences of your clients ahead of those of your competitors,” he continued. Additionally, despite having ample resources, Microsoft decided against creating its own search engine management tool.
Requests for comment from the DOJ and the Colorado state attorney general’s office, which is leading the states’ action, were not immediately fulfilled.
