WASHINGTON — The biggest U.S. challenge so far to the vast power of today’s tech giants is nearing its conclusion.
Starting Thursday, lawyers for the Justice Department, state attorneys general and Google delivered their final arguments in a yearslong case — U.S. et al. v. Google — over whether the tech giant broke federal antitrust laws to maintain its online search dominance. Arguments are scheduled to conclude Friday.
The government claims that Google competed unfairly when it paid Apple and other companies billions of dollars to automatically handle searches on smartphones and web browsers. Google insists that consumers use its search engine because it is the best product.
In the coming weeks or months, the judge who has overseen the trial in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Amit P. Mehta, will deliver a ruling that could change the way Google does business or even break up the company — or absolve the tech giant completely. Many antitrust experts expect he will land somewhere in the middle, ruling only some of Google’s tactics out of bounds.
The trial is the biggest challenge to date to the vast power of today’s tech giants, which have defined an era when billions of people around the world depend on their products for information, social interaction and commerce. U.S. regulators have also sued Apple, Amazon and Meta in recent years for monopolistic behavior, and Google’s case is likely to set a legal precedent for the group.
“This will be the most important decision and the most important antitrust trial of the 21st century,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School who studies antitrust. “It’s the first of the major monopolization cases against the major tech platforms to go to trial, and so that makes it a bellwether.”
The Justice Department declined to comment. A spokesperson for Google pointed to an earlier statement from one of the company’s executives that the evidence from the trial confirmed that people “have many choices when searching for information online, and they use Google because it’s helpful.”
Once closing arguments conclude, Mehta must determine whether Google has monopoly power over the two products at issue in the case: general search engines and the ads that run in search results. To do so, he may look at Google’s overall share of the market and whether its power over search can be disrupted by competitors.
Then, if he determines that Google has monopoly power, Mehta will decide if the company broke the law by making agreements to be the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers to defend its market share.
While the government has not yet revealed what it may ask for if the judge rules in its favor, it could ask Mehta to make structural changes to Google’s business.
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