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What the U.S. Has Argued in the Google Antitrust Trial
As the government wraps up its case in the landmark monopoly trial, it has built a picture of how Google became dominant in online search — and the harms that it says resulted.
David McCabe, Cecilia Kang and
Reporting from the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington
Since Sept. 12., the Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general have questioned more than 30 witnesses as they try to prove that Google broke antitrust laws, in a landmark monopoly trial that may affect the power of the technology industry.
The government is now wrapping up its side in the case — U.S. et al. v. Google — setting the stage for the internet giant to mount its defense starting this week.
Two prime threads have emerged from the government’s case: what it said Google did to illegally maintain its search and search ads monopolies and how those practices harmed consumers and advertisers. We lay out the main arguments.
How Google kept its online search dominance going
Google paid Apple billions of dollars to crush competition
On the first day of the trial, the Justice Department said Google had paid Apple and other tech platforms more than $10 billion a year to make itself the default search engine on the iPhone and other devices.
It was perhaps the most important piece of evidence to support the government’s central argument: that Google broke the law by using multibillion-dollar contracts to be the default search engine across the internet so it could maintain its monopoly. The eye-popping value of the deals had not been revealed before and helped the Justice Department set the tone for the trial.
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In this 2017 internal Google document, an executive compares the search ads business to that of selling cigarettes or drugs. The executive testified at the trial that he produced the document during a communications training where he was practicing how to use hyperbole to get someone’s attention.
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In one 2019 email, a Google executive, Jerry Dischler, wrote to a colleague that the company was at risk of missing its revenue targets.
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