At the antitrust hearing on September 12, Google insisted that it did not break the law to maintain its huge market share and argued that its search engine was popular because of its superiority. Google lawyer John Schmidtlein said the payments the DOJ mentioned were used to compensate partners for ensuring software maintenance and timely security updates.
Schmidtlein argues that consumers who are unhappy with Google are just a few clicks away from changing their default search engine to Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. However, the majority of Microsoft desktop software users prefer Google, even though Bing is pre-installed on the Edge browser.
The person in charge of the lawsuit for the US Department of Justice - lawyer Kenneth Dintzer said that Google began to monopolize the search engine market since 2010. After suppressing competitors, the technology "giant" has increasingly innovated its tools and paid less attention to privacy issues.
Search is a key part of Google's business, driving advertising sales and other profitable areas.
In addition, Google handles about 90% of the world's search queries. The more searches it processes, the more data it collects, which gives it a leg up on its competitors. In an internal document, Google once called the agreements an "Achilles heel" for rival search engines.
Dintzer accused Google of abusing its monopoly power to force advertisers to pay higher prices for its services. He also said he found evidence that Google concealed information about payments made to other companies, claiming that these agreements maintained Google's illegal monopoly in the market.
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