Would You Still Use Google if It Didn't Pay Apple $20 Billion to Get on Your iPhone?
Microsoft has poured over $100 billion into developing its Bing search engine over the past two decades but has little market share to show for it. About nine out of every 10 web searches in the US are made through Google, with Bing splitting the remaining queries with a long list of small competitors.
On Thursday the US government asked a federal judge in Washington, DC, to rule that Google maintains that lead illegally, by unfairly manipulating users to keep Microsoft and other competitors down.
Google’s dominance drove the US Department of Justice to sue the company in 2020 alleging that it had violated antitrust law by using exclusionary contracts to maintain a monopoly. The two sides went into a secretive trial at the end of last year before breaking for nearly five months for US Judge Amit Mehta to digest the evidence. Mehta heard closing arguments on Thursday, with government attorneys arguing that without his intervention Google’s dominance would remain in years to come—despite nascent threats from AI chatbots like ChatGPT. “The search engine industry has been impervious to any competitor entering,” attorney Kenneth Dintzer said.
