Google foreshadows its final arguments in search monopoly trial

Google has offered a glimpse into its final arguments to a DC federal judge as it seeks to convince the court it’s not operating an unlawful monopoly in search.

The company filed an unsealed version of its posttrial brief on Friday in its battle against the US Department of Justice over its search distribution agreements. The DOJ has argued that Google used exclusionary contracts with phone manufacturers and web browser operators to make it harder for other search engines to compete. The agency’s own brief, filed later in the day in conjunction with a coalition of states, contends that Google “exploited its monopoly power to ‘freeze the ecosystem’ of what should otherwise be a vibrant and competitive industry.”

In the brief filed Friday, Google said that evidence from the trial shows “conclusively” that “Google is the highest quality, most popular search engine in the United States, with the highest general search engine advertising monetization. The evidence additionally established that the partners who choose to contract with Google to preload Google Search as the default search engine overwhelmingly prefer Google to any other search engine.”

The government has argued that Google wielded its massive spending power by paying billions of dollars a year to companies like Apple to maintain its default search engine position on their platforms and devices, locking rivals out of the market. The trial revealed that Google gives Apple 36 percent of search ad revenue it gets from Safari. In 2021, according to The New York Times, Google paid Apple about $18 billion for the default spot on iPhones.

“Google is not focused on spending its money, attention, and time on improving general search and search advertising because it does not have to,” the plaintiffs’ brief argues, claiming the result is jacked-up costs for advertisers and less market innovation for users. “Consumers have little choice, lose out on better products, and sacrifice their privacy — with advertisers paying higher prices — because there are no meaningful alternatives to Google.”

Witnesses at the trial included executives that run Google Search competitors, like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg. They described how Google’s alleged cornering of the market prevented them from gaining the necessary search volume that could help them become more robust alternatives.

Google says that the DOJ and collection of states that sued it want to “have Google punished and uniquely handicapped from competing to win these revenue share agreements.” The result, Google argues, would be giving lower-quality search engines a leg up with the hope they will rise to the challenge, “despite a long track record of failing to achieve such success in the past, even after they won search defaults or otherwise acquired search query scale through agreements with other search engines like the 2009 Microsoft-Yahoo agreement.”

“That result is antithetical to U.S. antitrust law,” Google continues. “Punishing a successful firm that has out-innovated its competitors to the benefit of consumers harms competition, not the other way around.”

Closing arguments in the case are expected in May, following a multi-week trial that wrapped up at the end of 2023.

Google will confront the DOJ again later this year, when it will defend its advertising technology business against claims of illegal monopolization to a Virginia jury.

Update 6:55PM ET: Added news about plaintiffs’ posttrial brief after its filing.