Four takeaways from the Justice Department lawsuit

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Google concluded closing arguments Friday in a potentially historic antitrust case. The Department of Justice released a 370-page slideshow supporting claims that Google dominates the search engine market and exposing the digital giant's business strategy.

The Justice Department sued Google in 2020, accusing it of dominating digital search and displacing competitors like DuckDuckGo and Microsoft's Bing. This is the first major technology antitrust case since 1998's United States v. Microsoft, which found that Microsoft has a monopoly over computer operating systems.

Regulators have increased antitrust scrutiny of Big Tech in recent years, with the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice jointly filing major lawsuits against Amazon, Apple, and Meta this year, and This is the second antitrust lawsuit filed against Google. It claims monopolistic practices in the digital advertising market.

In its final summary of the case, the Justice Department released some compelling evidence of how much control Google has over the search market.

Google is said to have a nearly 90% share of the search market.

According to prosecutors, Google controls 89% of the search engine market. By contrast, federal regulators said Microsoft's Bing owns a 5.5% stake, Yahoo owns a 2.2% stake and DuckDuckGo owns a 2.1% stake. Google's search market share is even higher on mobile devices, at 98%. On desktop, it's slightly less (84%). Companies can start facing antitrust claims when they control just over 50% of a particular market.

As such, the Google case has been likened to United States v. Microsoft, in which it is argued that Microsoft similarly holds a dominant share of the computer operating system market, at more than 90%. The fact that Microsoft lost it doesn't bode well for Google.

Google donated nearly 40% of its advertising revenue to Apple to maintain its monopoly

In 2016, Google signed a deal with Apple to become the default search engine for the Safari web browser. In return, the company agreed to share 36% of the net ad revenue generated by Safari. Total payments to Apple reached $18 billion in 2021 and $20 billion in 2022. Google has similar exclusive deals with other device makers such as Samsung, as well as web browser developers such as Mozilla. These exclusive deals account for his 50% of all search queries in the US in a particular browser.

But Apple also considered having a version of Safari with different search defaults than Google, and giving consumers the option to choose a different search engine, the Justice Department revealed. According to the agency, Google flatly rejected these proposals from Apple.

Apple executives considered making DuckDuckGo the default for Safari's private browsing mode, largely due to concerns about Google's failure to protect user privacy. However, Apple's partnership with DuckDuckGo was limited by its agreement with Google.

[Googles exclusivity agreements] Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, who testified for the plaintiffs, said it would essentially effectively freeze the ecosystem.

Google can raise prices without worrying about competitors

By legal standards, a monopoly occurs when a company can set its prices without worrying about the impact on its business. The Justice Department found that Google could raise prices by 10% to 15% without threatening profits.

As a general matter, Google does not regularly or systematically compare the relative prices of various Google digital advertising products, and Google does not regularly or systematically compare the relative prices of Google search ads with ads offered by various sellers. Prosecutors wrote that there was no comparison.

Google executives were asked during the trial whether they had considered ad pricing on Facebook or Bings, but they said they had not.

Google reportedly made it impossible for Microsoft's Bing to compete

Google staff investigated how much Microsoft's search engine Bing would have to pay Apple to effectively match its own terms.

The company named the project “Alice in Wonderland” and codenamed Bing “Alice,” according to emails between officials seen by the Justice Department. The researchers found that if Google only pays out about 34% of its own ad revenue, Bing would have to give Apple 122% of Google's equivalent ad revenue. Google currently shares 36% of its search ad revenue from Safari with Apple.

In 2022, Google paid Apple nearly twice as much as Microsoft Bings' global ad revenue for the entire year.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://qz.com/doj-google-antitrust-trial-takeaways-closing-arguments-1851458634 The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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