The United States Department of Justice will file an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, regarding its search engine and its dominant position in several other industries, including advertising. Several sources, including the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Associated Press, broke the news citing senior officials from the department.
The lawsuit, which is expected to be handled by the federal court in Washington, is the strongest judicial initiative the United States has decided against a large technology company in recent decades. According to the department, writes the Wall Street Journal, Google has been maintaining its monopoly role for years through an illegal network of commercial deals with the aim of excluding competitors.
The Justice Department will argue that Google uses billions of dollars raised from advertisements on its platform to pay browser developers, such as Apple's Safari, to keep Google as the default search engine. Through this practice, Google would have managed to be the default search engine on hundreds of millions of American devices, with little opportunity for any other company to compete.
