Google has refuted claims that it is the most popular search engine in the world due to unethical business tactics, claiming that switching to a different provider just requires “literally four taps.”
The corporation is currently through a trial to determine if it is a monopoly, and one of its attorneys made the comments in court on Tuesday in Washington, DC.
The situation is a significant test of the authority of American authorities over the tech behemoths.
The case, according to the prosecution, is about “the future of the internet.”
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, as well as representatives from Apple will testify throughout the trial, which is scheduled to last 10 weeks.
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Judge Amit Mehta, who was appointed to his position on the DC district court by former president Barack Obama, will decide the case – the biggest for the industry in 25 years.
The government’s lawsuit focuses on billions of payments Google has made to Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and others to be pre-installed as the default online search engine.
The US said Google typically pays more than $10bn a year for that privilege, securing its access to a steady gush of user data that helped maintain its hold on the market.
“Are there other distribution channels? Other ways of distributing search? Yes…. Are these as powerful as defaults? No,” Department of Justice lawyer Kenneth Dintzer said, addressing the judge. “The best testimony for that, for the importance of defaults, your Honour, is Google’s chequebook.”
When Apple first installed Google as the default search engine in 2002, no payments were involved, prosecutors said.
But by 2005, worried about its lead eroding, Google proposed to pay the company – later threatening to cancel payments if other firms got similar access, the government said.
The company also discouraged Apple from expanding its own search products and Samsung, which makes Android phones, from working with a company that used a different kind of search method.
“This is a monopolist, flexing,” Mr Dintzer said.
Google said it faced intense competition, not just from general search engine firms, such as Microsoft’s Bing, but more specialised sites and apps that people use to find restaurants, airline flights and more.
“There are lots of ways users access the web, other than through default search engines, and people use them all the time,” the company’s lawyer, John Schmidtlein, said.
“The evidence in this case will show Google competed on the merits to win pre-installation and default status, and that its browser and Android partners judged Google to be the best search engine for its users.”
Mr Schmidtlein said that despite Windows PCs being the number one used desktop and having Bing pre-set as the default browser, a majority of Windows users still opt to use Google – demonstrating Google’s superiority as a search platform.
The trial is the latest regulatory challenge to face Google, which recently settled another case over its app store brought by US states. The company is also facing a federal lawsuit over its advertising business and has found itself in the crosshairs in Europe, where it has been fined billions in monopoly cases.
The government has asked for “structural relief” if it wins – which could mean the break-up of the company.
The suit comes as artificial intelligence and new forms of search, such as ChatGPT, are providing a more serious threat to Google’s dominance than the company has encountered in years.
Source: BBC
