| Following a roughly 16-month investigation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and 11 state Attorneys General filed a long-awaited but reportedly hurried antitrust suit against Google, alleging a variety of monopolistic and anticompetitive practices Google reacted to the DOJ lawsuit by calling it “deeply flawed” and arguing it “would do nothing to help consumers.” Google’s SVP of Global Affairs Kent Walker says in a blog post, “People don’t use Google because they have to, they use it because they choose to.” The company also argues that if the litigation succeeds, it could “prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use.” In other words, rather than relieving consumer harm it would cause harm. The nearly 60-page complaint essentially focuses on and repeats the following arguments: – Google maintains unlawful monopolies in “general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising” – Google uses revenue sharing, direct payments and restrictive contracts to block rivals from gaining wide distribution and competing effectively – The company uses its power to coerce mobile phone makers to pre-install Google apps if they want access to the Google Play store The complaint discusses the Apple-Google search relationship at length. It presents intriguing but unattributed factoids such as, “Google estimates that, in 2019, almost 50 percent of its search traffic originated on Apple devices.” The complaint also does a very deep dive into the varieties of Android contracts and how they allegedly use a mixture of “carrots and sticks” to help Google maintain control over the open-source Android ecosystem. One key question in the litigation is about the health and viability of competition in Google’s markets. Google has marginalized or neutralized it, says the DOJ, citing Google’s search market share. But Google counters that the law isn’t for the benefit of competitors but consumers. The DOJ argues that Google’s exclusionary contracts have helped lock up distribution and capture “nearly 90 percent of all general-search-engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent of queries on mobile devices.” Google claims the DOJ is too narrowly focused on a few rivals: Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo. Google says this is myopic and submits, in addition to “search engines,” it competes with many specialized sites such as Amazon, Yelp, Kayak and TripAdvisor. Google also mentions Pinterest as a competitor, among others. Read the full analysis here » | 
