Google faces first major antitrust trial of the Internet era

The U.S. Government has accused the technology behemoth Google of engaging in unfair business practices; the trial against the company begins this Tuesday in Washington and poses the greatest legal risk the business has ever faced.

Senior technology executives, engineers, economists, and academics will testify during the District Court of Columbia proceeding, which is anticipated to continue for roughly ten weeks, in an effort to shed light on how the American corporation came to dominate Internet search engines.

The Justice Department spent three years building the case, which was started when Republican Donald Trump was president (2017–2021) and passed to Democrat Joe Biden in 2021.

According to American media publications like The New York Times, the technological business has employed hundreds of workers, three prestigious law firms, and spent millions on legal costs and lobbyists in order to defend itself.

The Department of Justice claims that Google illegally stifled competition by paying businesses—including Apple—to make their search engine the default on their products and platforms.

Data from data analytics company Similarweb points out that Google has 90% of the search engine market in the United States and 91% worldwide.

However, Google has assured that its agreements with Apple and others were not exclusive and that consumers could easily alter the default settings on their devices to choose alternative engines.