Google Antitrust Trial: Google Viewed Exclusive Search Deals as a ‘Weapon,’ Justice Department says
It’s a familiar legal argument: A dominant tech company that has abused its market power to bully industry partners, protect its monopoly and thwart competition.
The Justice Department’s case against the internet search giant Google has unmistakable echoes with a landmark federal suit against Microsoft a quarter-century ago. As with Microsoft then, Google is accused of using its overwhelming market power to unfairly cut competitors off from potential customers.
The lawsuit against Google points to the Microsoft case and that company’s tactics in the 1990s, when it was accused of trying to hobble competition in the early days of internet browsers. “Google deploys the same playbook,” the government declares, by illegally wielding its might in online search much as Microsoft did with its personal computer operating system, Windows.
Back then, if you wanted to get online, chances are you did it through a computer that ran Windows. About 90 percent of personal computers used Microsoft’s Windows software and Microsoft controlled the software and services that were featured on those Windows PC screens.
But Microsoft was also invoked in a different way during opening statements on Tuesday.
Google’s lead courtroom lawyer, John E. Schmidtlein, sought to focus the attention of the judge on Microsoft — another tech giant, instead of on Google’s smaller rivals in the search market, like DuckDuckGo.
Mr. Schmidtlein said Microsoft’s Bing search engine trails Google in market share not because of improper tactics by Google, but because it is an inferior product.
“Microsoft has failed to invest, failed to innovate” relative to Google, he said.
And Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo’s search engine aren’t the only competitors to Google, Mr. Schmidtlein argued. He name-checked Wayfair, Walmart, Amazon and Overstock for shopping, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Hotels.com and Expedia for travel and Doordash, Grubhub, UberEats and Yelp for food delivery.
Although the legal theory advanced against Google by the Justice Department mirrors the one used in the Microsoft case, that was a different era. When the Microsoft trial started, it was the high tide of early internet euphoria. E-commerce was just getting underway, and every industry wanted to jump on the digital bandwagon. The first Blackberry, essentially an email device, was introduced in 1999. The iPhone, which started the smartphone era, didn’t arrive until 2007.
The Microsoft case ultimately ended in a settlement. The resulting consent decree prohibited the company from imposing restrictive contracts, freed PC makers to load and feature other companies’ software and forced Microsoft to disclose more technical information.
The leading beneficiary of the more open environment was an internet search start-up called Google, with new technology and later a new business model. It was founded in September 1998, one month before the Microsoft trial began.
