US: Antitrust trial against tech giant Google, its search engine dominance to begin soon

Sundar Pichai. Image/AFP

Tech giant Google will be confronting a threat to its dominant search beginning Tuesday as federal regulators begin the second biggest antitrust trial United States of America has witnessed since the Microsoft trial. Over the course of next 10 weeks, federal lawyers and state attorneys will be trying to prove Google rigged the market in its favour by locking its search engine in as the default choice in various devices, stated a report in Associated Press.

Reportedly, US District Judge Amit Mehta is likely to issue a ruling only early next year; however, if he finds Google guilty of rigging, another trial shall ensue to decide what measures have to be taken to rein in the California-based company.

According to the report, top executives from Google, its parent company Alphabet Inc. and other execs from powerful technology companies are likely to testify. Among the executives is likely to be Alphabet's Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai, successor of Google co-founder Larry Page. The AP report citing the court documents said that Eddy Cue, high high-ranking Apple executive, might be called to the stand as well.

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The antitrust lawsuit against Google was filed nearly three years ago during the Trump administration by the Justice Department charging the company of misuse of its internet search dominance to gain an unfair advantage against competitors.

The government lawyers have alleged Google protects its franchise using a form of graft and shells out billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on the iPhone and web browsers like Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari. They also claimed that Google illegally rigged the market in its favour by mandating its search engine to be bundled with Android software for smartphones if device manufacturers want full access to the Android app store, according to AP report.

However, the tech giant has countered the claims and said that it faces a wide range of competition despite commanding nearly 90 per cent of the internet search market. It said that perpetual improvements to its search engine are why people reflexively go back to using their product and made ‘Googling' synonymous with looking things up on the internet.

The trial is set to begin just a couple of weeks after the 25^th anniversary of the company's first investment made by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim that enabled Larry Page and Sergey Brin to set up their office in the Silicon Valley garage.

Presently, Google's corporate parent Alphabet is worth $1.7 trillion and has over one lakh employees working for it. Most of their revenue, according to the AP report, comes from annual ad sales flowing through digital services network anchored by their search engine.

The antitrust case against Google is reminiscent of the case it once filed against Microsoft in 1998. Regulators then had accused the company of forcing computer makers relying on Windows operating system to also feature Internet Explorer which crushed competition from once-popular browser Netscape.

Several members who were part of the Microsoft trial are on the team of Google case including lead Justice Department litigator Kennet Dintzer.

One of the probable outcomes is the company could be forcibly stopped from paying Apple and other companies to make Google default search engine on smartphones and computers or the legal battle could cause the tech giant to lose focus like it did with Microsoft.