Google was in the dock this Tuesday in a trial in which the US justice system wants to clarify whether the overwhelming dominance of the company’s Internet search engine is due to its performance or whether illegal practices are behind this success.
“This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google will ever face serious competition in search,” Justice Department lawyer Kenneth Dintzer said as the US government began cracking down on the tech titan.
According to the US Department of Justice, the technology company consolidated its dominant position on the Internet through illegal contracts with companies such as Samsung, Apple and Firefox so that they installed its search engine by default on their smartphones and services.
A hundred witnesses will testify before federal Judge Amit Mehta during the 10-week scheduled hearings.
“Our success is deserved,” Kent Walker, chief legal officer of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said in a statement.
“People use Google not because they have no other choice, but because they want to. It is easy to change the default search engine, we no longer live in the age of modems and CD-ROMs,” he added.
It is the largest antitrust lawsuit against a tech giant since the Justice Department took action against Microsoft over its dominance of the Windows operating system more than 20 years ago.
“Even in Washington, D.C., I think we have the greatest concentration of blue suits today than anywhere else,” Mehta joked, looking around at the dozens of lawyers gathered in the courtroom.
The U.S. government’s lawsuit against Microsoft, initiated in 1998, ended in a settlement in 2001 after an appeals court overturned a decision ordering the company to be dissolved.
