Google Antitrust Trial: What to Know About Landmark Court Case

On Tuesday, the entrances to the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse and the William B. Bryant Annex at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia will provide a pathway to a landmark case against U.S. tech giant Google.

The trial—United States v. Google LLC and State of Colorado v. Google LLC—is slated to start at 9.30 a.m. in courtroom 10 and revolves around the question of whether Google's dominance of the search engine business is unlawful.

In a complaint first filed back in 2020, the Justice Department argued that the scrappy startup that years ago developed a fresh way to search for content on the internet has evolved into something else entirely.

"Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet," the complaint reads. "For many years, Google has used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising—the cornerstones of its empire."

Those tactics, the government claims, have positioned the company to become a de facto search engine in different platforms through which consumers access the internet.

"Google pays billions of dollars each year to distributors—including popular-device manufacturers such as Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung; major U.S. wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and browser developers such as Mozilla, Opera, and UCWeb—to secure default status for its general search engine," the Justice Department argues. "And, in many cases, to specifically prohibit Google's counterparties from dealing with Google's competitors."

Google disputes this characterization. The company has argued that its deals with the likes of Apple and others do not exclude potential competitors from creating their own search platforms, or have those alternatives included in devices used by consumers to go online. Companies decide to make Google a default search engine because it offers "the highest quality" to consumers.

"Apple and Mozilla can—and do—promote other search engines," Google has suggested. "A browser provider's selection of a single default search engine cannot 'exclude' its rivals in any legally cognizable sense."

Part of the intrigue around the case is the potential prospect of seeing top executives in the world of tech, including Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai, in court over the next few months talking about their business.

The case is being compared to the government's challenge of Microsoft over its dominance with Internet Explorer back in the 1990s. The government and Microsoft eventually settled the case, with the tech company agreeing to have non-Microsoft software included in its computers. One of the lawyers who argued the government's case at the time, Kent Walker, is now the lead lawyer working at Google.

"This lawsuit is deeply flawed," he wrote in a blog post. "People don't use Google because they have to—they use it because they want to."

What's at stake for the company is whether, at the end of this process, the firm may be forced to change the nature of how it distributes its search products with some suggestion that it could forced to separate its businesses.

The trial is slated to last a little over three months with a ruling expected to arrive later next year. But that doesn't account for potential appeals, which could mean the final result of this case won't be known for years to come.