The Justice Department puts Google on the defensive
In 1998, the US Department of Justice sued Microsoft, alleging that the company had abused its monopoly over personal computing by forcing users of its Windows operating system to adopt Internet Explorer as their browser, among other things. In 2001, the two sides settled the case.
Two decades later, Google is ten times the size that Microsoft was in the nineties, with a market value of almost two trillion dollars and control over more than 90 percent of online search and related advertising. On Tuesday, the first major antitrust case since the Microsoft trial got underway in a DC courtroom—with Google in the role of defendant. The Justice Department intends to prove that Google has misused its search monopoly to harm its competitors and that it has maintained that monopoly through illegal means, including paying smartphone companies like Apple billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine on their products. (Google’s dominance in advertising is the subject of a separate lawsuit that has yet to reach trial.)
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