Google Antitrust Trial Concludes With Closing Arguments – The New York Times

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. American 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 spokesman 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.”At the heart of the case is Google’s dominance in online search, which generates billions in profits annually. The Justice Department says Google’s search engine conducts nearly 90 percent of web searches.The company spent $26.3 billion in 2021 alone to become the default search engine on browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox, meaning it is automatically selected for users out of the box, according to information presented at the trial. Apple’s share was about $18 billion, The New York Times has reported.