The 10-week trial, set to begin Tuesday, amps up efforts to rein in Big Tech by targeting the core search business that turned Google into a $1.7 trillion behemoth.
  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The case — U.S. et al. v. Google — is the federal government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor.

    The case centers on whether Google illegally cemented its dominance and squashed competition by paying Apple and other companies to make its internet search engine the default on the iPhone as well as on other devices and platforms.

    Google eventually parlayed that success into new business lines including online advertising, video streaming, maps, office apps, driverless cars and artificial intelligence.

    Rivals have long accused Google of brandishing its power in search to suppress competitors’ links to travel, restaurant reviews and maps, while giving greater prominence to its own content.

    In its lawsuit, the government accused Google of hurting rivals like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo by employing agreements with Apple and other smartphone makers to become the default search engine on their web browsers or be preinstalled on their devices.

    The agency added that Google had behaved similarly to Microsoft in the 1990s, when the software giant made its own web browser the default on the Windows operating system, crushing competitors.

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