The US Department of Justice sued Google for violating the antitrust law. Google unfairly monopolizes Internet search and related advertisements, and is forcing Google to designate Google as the default search engine with the initial installation of its applications on the Google product operating system, that is, Android smartphones.
Google pays billions of dollars annually to popular smartphone makers such as Apple, LG Electronics, Motorola, and Samsung Electronics, major mobile carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, and even web browser developers such as Mozilla, Opera, and etc. The lawsuit appeals that it is occupied.
Of course, Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs at Google, countered that it wasn’t the company’s coercion, but that they chose to use us. The contracts between Google, Apple, and other device manufacturers and telecommunications providers are the same as the contracts that many other companies have used to distribute software, and other search engines such as Microsoft Bing are competing with such contracts. They claimed to have passed antitrust reviews each time. It also added that Google is also competing with Twitter, Expedia, and Open Teddy.
However, some of our competitors disagree. In posting a welcome tweet, CEO Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo, said that Google’s anti-competitive practices are hurting companies like the company, and that this tracking and surveillance business model has a negative impact on society and democracy. Said that it should be possible.
There are reports that this antitrust lawsuit will be a big case after the lawsuit filed with Microsoft in 1998. Microsoft pre-installed major software such as Internet Explorer exclusively on Windows, which occupied its dominant share at the time, and the court ordered Microsoft to split. Of course, Microsoft eventually reached an agreement. The US Department of Justice also mentioned the Microsoft case in a Google lawsuit, pointing out that Google at the time claimed that Microsoft was anti-competitive, but now Google is trying to unfold the same story as Microsoft in order to maintain its monopoly.
Earlier this year, CEOs of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple attended a public hearing on antitrust in the US House of Representatives. At the time, Congress said that all four GAFAs should be split, but of course these companies disagreed with the proposal. In addition, Google is being investigated for antitrust laws in the EU as well, and the amount of sanctions reached 8.2 billion euros. Google is trying to disagree. Related information can be found here .