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[WASHINGTON] Alphabet’s Google faces a historic trial on Monday (Apr 21) as US antitrust enforcers in Washington seek to force the tech giant to sell off its Chrome browser as part of a bid to restore competition to the market for online search engines.
The US Department of Justice is heading into trial after two major legal victories against Google, having won a ruling in August that Google monopolised search.
The trial comes on the heels of a win in a Virginia court on Thursday where a judge ruled in a separate antitrust case that Google maintains an illegal monopoly in advertising technology.
The outcome of the trial could fundamentally reshape the Internet by unseating Google as the go-to portal for information online.
Google plans to appeal the final ruling in the case.
“When it comes to antitrust remedies, the US Supreme Court has said that ‘caution is key.’ DOJ’s proposal throws that caution to the wind,” Google executive Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a blog post on Sunday.
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US District Judge Amit Mehta is scheduled to oversee the three-week trial at the same courthouse where Meta Platforms is facing its own antitrust trial over the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
The US Department of Justice and a coalition of 38 state attorneys general have proposed far-reaching measures designed to quickly open the search market and give new competitors a leg up.
Their proposals include ending exclusive agreements in which Google pays billions of US dollars annually to Apple and other device vendors to make Google the default search engine on their tablets and smartphones.
Google would also have to licence search results to competitors, among other requirements. And it would be made to sell its Android mobile operating system if other remedies fail to restore competition.
Prosecutors have said they expect testimony about how Google’s agreements to be the default search engine on mobile devices have hampered distribution efforts by artificial intelligence companies. Witnesses from Perplexity AI and OpenAI are expected to take the stand.
Google sees the proposals as extreme, and said the court should stick to limiting the terms of its default agreements.
The US$1.9 trillion tech company has been subsidising browser makers such as Mozilla by paying to remain the default search engine. Cutting off that financial support could threaten their existence, Google says. And ending payments to device makers would raise the cost of smartphones, the company claims.
Google plans to call witnesses from Mozilla, Verizon and Apple, which launched a failed bid to intervene in the case.
Few potential buyers of Chrome have the same incentive as Google to maintain the free open-source code that underpins it, and which others including Microsoft use as a basis for their own browsers, the company says. REUTERS
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