This photo, taken on September 11, 2023, displays various Google logos when you are sought after on Google. If government regulators manage to force Google to turn its activity as a Chrome browser, it is likely to release drastic changes designed to undermine the domination of the Google search engine.
Richard Drew / AP
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Richard Drew / AP
Google is back in court on Monday for the final phase of a benchmark antitrust case This can lead to its break, a decision that would send shock waves in the world of technology and shake research on the Internet.
In 2020, the Ministry of Justice, joined by a group of states, accused Google of having illegally smothered the competition by paying manufacturers of web browser and phones to define Google as default search engine. Last summer, the American district judge Amit Mehta accepted, decision After a 10 -week test, “Google is a monopoly, and it acted as one to maintain its monopoly”.
The company of nearly 2 dollars said it said it will – But he cannot until this phase of the trial is finished.
“People do not use Google because they must-they use it because they want it”, Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice-president of Google for regulatory affairs, said in a declaration in December.
From Monday, Mehta will chase an audience which should extend over several weeks, during which the Ministry of Justice and Google will present competing visions of an appeal on the appropriate market for the monopolistic behavior of the company. After the two parties argue their cases, Mehta decides remedies.
The government says that the judge should order Google to stop making third -party payments to telephony manufacturers like Apple who guarantee its default research position. They also call Google to turn your Chrome web browser and possibly sell its Android operating system for smartphone.
Chrome is the first web and Android browser in the world is used by more smartphones users than any other operating system. Chrome is preloaded with Google Search Engine as defect, and Android is grouped with Google Apps, including Chrome.
The very profitable advertising activity of the technological company is fueled by data that it harvested user activity on Chrome and Google Search.
In a pre-abunui thesis on April 14, Google lawyers argued that the appeals proposed by the Ministry of Justice do not correspond to the conduct for which it has proven to be anti-competitive. The stages “would harm consumers and innovation, as well as future competition in research and research announcements in addition to many other adjacent markets,” they wrote.
They argue that this will force consumers to use other search engines – even if these engines are “obviously lower” and that the user would prefer Google.
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, antitrust professor at the Vanderbilt Law School, said that, even if Google calls on, the case defines how digital markets will be regulated.
“I think this case could really set the tone to what the antitrust application on digital markets looks like. And I think it’s already in a way,” she said. “This is the idea that just because you are great and you were innovative and you create a new product that changes the life of everyone, and everyone uses it a little does not mean that you can then defend this monopoly by excluding others and so to stop this innovation.”
The latest government antitrust case linked to technology of this magnitude was against Microsoft, which started in 1998. This case was focused on the question of whether Microsoft abused a monopoly position by grouping its Internet Explorer browser with its almost ubital Windows operating system. A district court has ordered that the company be divided into two, but this part of the decision was canceled on appeal. The DoJ and Microsoft finally settled.
The case has prepared the ground for Google to emerge as a competitor and possible leader in online research.
John Newman, an expert in antitrust law from the University of Miami, said that the current case against Google could create another major change in the environment for technological innovation. “If the judge does everything the government asks … The landscape might seem rather radically different if you are, let’s say, a Gen Ai startup,” he said, referring to generative artificial intelligence, to automatic learning systems that can be used to make text and images.
It can become easier, for example, than technological startups obtain products that compete with Google – in research or AI, for example – in front of consumers. For the moment, he says that Google is “like gravity”.
“It is always the default on your phone. It is always the default value on your browser. It constantly pulls people in the old way to do things,” he said. In the “Battleground for Ideas”, he said, this affair “sends a message that, no, the government will not withdraw and let the markets do their thing.”
An initial proposal from the Ministry of Justice for appeals included Google’s forcing to withdraw from its investments in AI, which includes more than $ 3 billion which it paid in Anthropic, the AI ​​research company which developed the Grande Language Claude model.
In March, however, the Doj changed adequacy. In a judicial file, the government declared that it was still concerned about Google’s potential capacity to influence AI companies, but that it had abandoned the requirement of disinvestment, claiming that the fact that the company is completely investment in AI could “cause unexpected consequences in the evolution of the AI ​​of space”.
Big Tech is under fire on several fronts. The Google hearing on Monday comes after a judge of the American district court in Virginia ruled against the company In another major caseAffirming that the company illegally maintained a monopoly in certain online advertising technologies.
And the meta-PDG Mark Zuckerberg was in court last week entirely Its social media platform in a case in which the Federal Trade Commission maintains that the technological giant abused its power and acted as a monopoly by acquiring rivals in order to smash them as competitors.
