(NewsReady.com) – Liberal tech giant Google is trying to fight off an antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice, which alleges it has an illegal monopoly on the search engine market. The company has now claimed there’s a simple reason most people use Google to search the internet — it’s just better than its competitors. It’s an argument, but it still leaves serious questions about how Google pressures businesses to promote its search engine.
On September 12, the Justice Department launched the biggest antitrust trial of the century, with Google in the dock for forcing device manufacturers to set its search engine as the default. The DOJ says this has shut out rival search engines, giving Google an unfair advantage. Currently, Google has 93.18% of the global search engine market; its closest rival, Microsoft’s Bing, has just 2.87% — despite being the default search engine installed on every Windows PC.
Google claims it’s achieved this crushing dominance because its search engine is just better than anyone else’s. One of the company’s lawyers told the court that people use it “because it delivers value to them, not because they have to.” However, the DOJ and the attorneys general of all 50 US states and both US territories disagree. They say Google is using its power and wealth to make it harder for people to access its rivals.
The DOJ is pointing to the fact Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year — $15 billion in 2021 — to make its search engine the default on the Safari browser, which is installed on millions of Apple devices. Google also forbids phone and tablet makers who use its Android operating system from pre-installing any other search engine on their devices. Google’s search engine may well be the best (or it may not), but the company definitely seems to want to make sure it’s the only one users can get access to without doing some extra work.
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