That bundling practice crushed competition from the once-popular browser Netscape. Regulators then accused Microsoft of forcing computer makers that relied on its dominant Windows operating system to also feature Microsoft’s Internet Explorer - just as the internet was starting to go mainstream. The Justice Department’s antitrust case echoes the one it filed against Microsoft in 1998. Today, Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, is worth $1.7 trillion and employs 182,000 people, with most of the money coming from $224 billion in annual ad sales flowing through a network of digital services anchored by a search engine that fields billions of queries a day. The trial begins just a couple weeks after the 25th anniversary of the first investment in Google - a $100,000 check written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim that enabled Page and Sergey Brin to set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage. “At every critical juncture,” he said, “they were beaten in the market.” Schmidtlein said Google’s tweaks simply made its search better than key rival Bing. References to “cutting off their air supply’ and similar comments, for instance, “should be avoided.’įrom Google’s perspective, perpetual improvements to its search engine explain why people almost reflexively keep coming back to it, a habit that long ago made “Googling” synonymous with looking things up on the internet. “We should be careful about what we say in both public and private,’ Varian wrote. While questioning Google chief economist Hal Varian – the trial’s first witness – Dintzer produced a July 2003 memo in which Varian urged Google employees to be cautious about how they discussed competition with Microsoft, lest they raise antitrust concerns. “They turned history off, your honor, so they could rewrite it in this court.’ “They destroyed documents for years,’ Dintzer said. Litigators argue the company’s anticompetitive tactics prevented Apple from developing a search engine of its own.Īnd Dintzer said Google deleted documents to keep them out of court proceedings and sought to hide others under attorney-client privilege. “This is Google saying: Take it or leave it.” “This is not a negotiation,” Dintzer said. He also alleged that Google strong-armed Apple into giving its search engine a default position on its devices as a condition for revenue sharing. Google “began weaponizing defaults” more than 15 years ago, Dintzer said, citing an internal Google document calling its arrangements an “Achilles Heel” for rival search engines offered by Yahoo and MSN. That is why, he said, Google pays so much for its search engine to be the default option on products from Apple and other companies. Because of its market dominance, “Google search and ad products are better than its rivals can hope to be.” “User data is the oxygen for a search engine,” he said. “There are lots of way users access the web other than default search engines, and people use them all the time,’ said attorney John Schmidtlein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly which is representing Google.īut the more searches Google processes, the more data it collects, data that can be used to improve future searches and give it an even bigger advantage over its rivals, Dintzer said. Its rivals, the company argues, range from search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing to websites like Amazon and Yelp, where consumers can post questions about what to buy or where to go. Google counters that it faces a wide range of competition despite commanding about 90% of the internet search market.
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