The United States Department of Justice, under the administration of Donald Trump, has announced that it has filed an antitrust suit against Alphabet, the company that controls Google, the most used search engine in the world. In essence, the government accuses Google of exercising a monopoly on other search engines and of maintaining its dominant position thanks to illegitimate agreements with other companies, which prevent real competition in the market.
The lawsuit will be handled by the federal court in Washington and according to experts it will be the most significant judicial initiative decided by the government against a large company in the technology sector in recent decades.
Antitrust experts have long argued that the products of major US tech companies, especially Google and Facebook, have achieved (and maintained) such pervasiveness that they effectively represent a monopoly. Furthermore, due to some scandals, in recent years their public image has deteriorated in a very transversal way, which has made MPs and senators more sensitive to the problems of the sector, despite Google spending tens of millions of dollars every year on lobbying activities. around the world.
The antitrust lawsuit, launched by the Department of Justice together with 11 attorneys general from individual states, focuses mainly on the methods used by Alphabet to ensure that Google continues to have a monopoly on online searches. At the moment in the United States, about 90 percent of searches are conducted on Google, which annually collects billions of dollars from the advertisements that appear on the results pages (in 2019 it was 34.3 billion, in three years according to estimates it will be more. of 40).
In the document that announced the lawsuit, federal investigators dwell a lot on the agreement between Alphabet and Apple, citing it as one of the most obvious cases of irregularity. According to the Justice Department, Alphabet pays between $ 8 billion and $ 12 billion each year to make sure Google is the default search engine on Apple iPhones, which the government estimates is where just under 50 percent comes. of searches carried out through Google.
The US government has framed the allegations against Google in a classic monopoly case. “If the government does not enforce antitrust laws to allow competition to exist, we could skip the next wave of innovation,” said a spokesman for the Justice Department, Marc Raimondi: “if it happens, Americans may never enjoy of the benefits brought by the next Google “.
Alphabet defended itself in a post on Google's blog claiming that the agreements cited by the Justice Department are legitimate – “we negotiate to get the attention of the shelf placed at eye level in supermarkets” – and defined the lawsuit initiated by the government ” full of problems “. “The point is that people do not use Google because they are forced to do so, but because they decide it themselves,” the post reads.
This isn't the first time Google has faced potentially billion-dollar antitrust lawsuits. In recent years it has been fined several times by the European Commission for some of its market strategies, for a total of around 8.2 billion euros. It is not clear what will become of the lawsuit initiated by the government, especially in the event of Trump's defeat in the upcoming presidential elections: some sources contacted by the New York Times explain that it will hardly be withdrawn, however. Among other things, Google's lawyers estimate that it will take more than a year to begin the actual trial.
