According to WSJ, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) accused Google of paying $10 billion annually to web browsers and smartphone manufacturers to dominate the search field and eliminate competitors.
At the antitrust trial on September 12, Google affirmed that the company did not violate the law to keep its huge market share and argued that its search engine was popular because of its superiority. Google lawyer John Schmidtlein said the payments mentioned by the DOJ are used to compensate partners, to ensure the software is maintained and updated in a timely manner.
Schmidtlein argues that consumers dissatisfied with Google are just a few clicks away from changing their default search engine to Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. However, the majority of Microsoft computer software users prefer Google, even though the Bing search engine is pre-installed on the Edge browser .
The person in charge of the lawsuit for the US Department of Justice – lawyer Kenneth Dintzer said that Google began to hold a monopoly in the search engine market in 2010. After stifling competitors, the technology “giant” Technology is increasingly improving its tools and not paying attention to privacy issues.
Besides, Google also handles about 90% of search queries worldwide. The more searches Google processes, the more data it collects, thus outperforming its competitors. In an internal document, Google once called the deals an “Achilles heel” for rival search engines.
Dintzer accused Google of taking advantage of its monopoly to force advertisers to pay higher service costs. In addition, he said he found evidence that Google concealed information related to payments transferred to other companies, asserting that these agreements maintained Google’s illegal monopoly in the market.