Legal drama stirs up the world of technology: a US federal court ruled that Google illegally exploited its dominant position in the search market, thereby violating the antitrust law. The decision was made after a 10-week trial, which began following a lawsuit filed in 2020 by a ministry American law and several countries. "Google is a monopoly, and it acted as such to maintain its position," wrote Judge Amit Mehta of the District Court of the District of Columbia in the ruling.
The lawsuit claimed that Google took illegal steps to maintain its undisputed control in the search field. One of the key steps was paying billions of dollars to companies like Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to make Google's search engine the default on their devices and browsers. According to the Ministry of Justice, Google is responsible for almost 90% of Internet searches, and by paying for its default search engine application, it prevented its competitors from reaching the scale of activity necessary for true competition. In doing so, Google enjoyed both huge revenues and the collection of valuable information about users.
The judge's ruling details how Google acknowledged that losing its position as the default search engine on various platforms would significantly hurt its revenue. For example, Google estimated that the loss of this position in Apple's Safari browser would cause a significant decrease in the number of queries and a loss of billions of dollars. Google, for its part, claims that its large market share is due to the quality of its product, and that consumers simply prefer its search engine. It is likely that the company will appeal the verdict.
Google responded:
"The decision acknowledges that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we should not allow it to be readily available. We appreciate the court's finding that Google is 'the highest-quality search engine in the industry, which has earned the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users,' that Google 'was The best search engine in a long time, especially on mobile devices', 'continued to innovate in the field of search' and that 'Apple and Mozilla occasionally evaluate the quality of Google's search in relation to its competitors and find that Google is superior'. Considering this, and the fact that people are looking for more information in more and more ways, We plan to challenge. While the process continues, we will continue to focus on creating products that people find useful and easy to use."