The US authorities have been dealing with the market power of Internet companies for months. The Ministry of Justice is now taking legal action against Google. The process could occupy the entire tech industry.
The US government will sue Internet giant Google for alleged antitrust violations. The company is accused of having acted anti-competitive in order to maintain its quasi-monopoly on internet searches and related advertising, which are the cornerstones of its business model. This is reported by several US media and news agencies, citing senior judicial officers. The Justice Department announced a press conference this Tuesday.
The long-awaited trial expected in federal court in Washington D.C. to be negotiated, is likely to be the most aggressive legal action by the US government against the power of a tech company in more than two decades. The case has the potential to shake up Silicon Valley as a whole.
According to the complaint, from which the judicial officers have already cited, the Justice Ministry is said to accuse the subsidiary of the Alphabet Group of having an illegal network of exclusive and interlocking business agreements as a gatekeeper to the Internet, which excludes competitors. Google is said to use billions of dollars earned through ads on its platform to pay cell phone manufacturers, wireless operators, and browsers like Apple's Safari to set up Google as their pre-installed default search engine.
Once a crowd-pleaser, Google has drawn considerable negative attention over the past decade. The search engine operator has so far been able to avoid a real showdown with the US government. In Europe it looks very different. The EU Commission has already fined the group several billion euros for collusion in search engine advertising. Here, too, Google is said to have used restrictive clauses in contracts to prevent advertisements from being placed with competing providers.
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