The Department of Justice's case that Google engaged in anticompetitive business practices, laid out in federal court in the past five weeks, focuses on the claim that the search engine's deal with Apple stopped Apple from making its own search platform.
The DOJ and Google are currently involved in a multiweek trial in the District of Columbia district court over a 2020 lawsuit alleging that Google had pushed its competitors out of the marketplace through default search engine agreements and its advertising software practices. The federal agency wrapped up its arguments last week, in which the prosecution attempted to convince Judge Amit Mehta that Google had blocked competition through exclusive deals with web browsers and phone makers as well as disincentivizing some of the search engine's biggest competitors from even trying to make their own product.
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The DOJ “has done a really good job of making their case and outlining the arguments in an intuitive way," Mark Meador, Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation Tech Policy Center, told the Washington Examiner.
Mehta heard from 29 witnesses during the DOJ's arguments, according to Bloomberg. The witnesses have varied in expertise, from economists to psychologists to senior executives from Big Tech companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung. Several parts of the trial were closed off due to trade secrets, although the press has filed for the testimony to be unsealed.
The witnesses collectively made the case that Google's billion-dollar deals with web browsers and mobile phone makers were used to push rivals out of the market and to stop them from gathering sufficient data from consumers in order to adapt and adjust their products in a way that would make them competitive. Google's deal with Apple came under scrutiny since the iPhone maker was the most likely technology company to have the capability to create a search engine that could technologically compete with Google.
"The heart" of the DOJ's case, Mehta said, is whether or not Google's decadeslong partnership with Apple allowed the search engine to hold a monopoly over search. If Google's deal had blocked Apple from developing its own search engine, then that would make the arrangement anti-competitive and potentially a violation of antitrust law.
Mark Jamison, a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, disagreed with that line of argument and said that Google has legally maintained its majority market control because it is based on users liking the product. "If Google wins 90%, 100% or even 50% of the search engine market based on preference, [market dominance] is just the consequence," Jamison told the Washington Examiner. "And that's a good consequence for the customers because the competition is on the merits. If the competition is based upon something else, then that's where you can have an antitrust problem."
The notion that search engine users have any meaningful ability to choose their search engine is "bogus," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified during the trial.
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Mikhail Parakhin, a lead executive at Microsoft, said that Apple only used Bing, Microsoft's search engine, as a "bargaining chip" in its negotiations with Google in order to "extract better conditions" from the two Big Tech giants' agreement. “It’s no secret that Apple is making more money on Bing existing than Bing does,” Parakhin added.
Google will begin making its defense next week. The company will focus on attempting to prove that its agreements are made based on Apple and consumers preferring the product. The search engine is also expected to argue that Parakhin's testimony proves that there are companies who can compete with Google but that Apple elevates Google's search because it is a better product., according to the Wall Street Journal.