Choose Amit P. Mehta was presiding over the primary day of closing arguments in essentially the most consequential tech antitrust case because the U.S. authorities sued Microsoft within the late Nineties. The Justice Division has sued Google, accusing it of illegally shoring up a monopoly in on-line search. Google has denied the claims.
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On Thursday, Mehta questioned the federal government’s argument that Google’s dominance had harm the standard of the expertise for looking for info on-line. However he additionally pushed Google to defend its central argument that it’s not a monopoly as a result of customers use different firms corresponding to Amazon to seek for procuring objects and TikTok to seek for music clips.
“Actually I do not assume the common individual would say, ‘Google and Amazon are the identical factor,'” Mehta stated.
His ruling — anticipated within the coming weeks or months — will assist set a precedent for a sequence of presidency challenges to tech giants’ measurement and energy. Federal regulators have additionally filed antitrust lawsuits towards Apple, Amazon and Meta, and a second case towards Google over internet advertising.
Earlier than the beginning of closing arguments in a U.S. District Court docket for the District of Columbia courtroom, Jonathan Kanter, head of the Justice Division’s antitrust division, approached Kent Walker, president of worldwide affairs at Google, to speak.
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Mehta started proceedings by questioning Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Division’s lead courtroom lawyer for the trial, about innovation in search. The federal government has argued {that a} lack of competitors within the on-line search enterprise — wherein, it says, virtually 90% of all searches are performed with Google — means Google does not must spend money on the standard of its search expertise. However Mehta advised Dintzer that it might be arduous to “dispute that search in the present day appears so much completely different than it did 10 to fifteen years in the past” and that a few of that change was on account of Google’s work.
“It appears to me a tough street so that you can go down for me to conclude that Google hasn’t innovated sufficient,” Mehta stated.
The Justice Division additionally argued that as a result of Google had a monopoly and did not face sturdy competitors, it hadn’t put privateness protections into its search engine. The decide interrupted Dintzer to say there could also be a “trade-off” for privateness versus the standard of search. Mehta added that his problem was how you can measure if Google had carried out sufficient to guard the privateness of customers.
Mehta prodded Google’s lead litigator, John E. Schmidtlein, on the argument that firms corresponding to Amazon and ESPN are true opponents to its search engine. He famous that if he wished to know who the shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles was in 1983, he would almost certainly use Google.
