Google revealed its final arguments to a federal judge in Washington, D.C., as it seeks to convince the court that it does not have an illegal monopoly in search.
The company filed an unsealed version of its post-trial brief on Friday to fight the U.S. Department of Justice’s search distribution agreement. The Justice Department argued that Google used exclusivity contracts with phone manufacturers and web browser operators to make it harder for other search engines to compete. The company is also expected to file its own brief by the end of the day.
In a brief filed Friday, Google said the trial evidence “conclusively” shows “that Google is the highest quality and most popular search engine in the United States, with the highest general search engine ad monetization rate. The evidence also shows that the choice to contract with Google , partners that have Google search pre-installed as their default search engine overwhelmingly prefer Google to any other search engine.”
Witnesses at the trial include executives who run Google search competitors, such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg. They describe how Google’s so-called monopoly market prevents them from gaining the necessary search volume to help them become a more powerful alternative.
Google said the Justice Department and the states suing it wanted to “punish Google and uniquely hinder its ability to compete to win these revenue-sharing agreements.” Google argued the results would give low-quality search engines a boost , hoping they can rise to the challenge “despite their long-standing failure to achieve this level of success in the past, even if they win search defaults or otherwise gain search query scale through agreements with other search engines (such as the 2009 Microsoft-Yahoo deal).”
“This result is contrary to U.S. antitrust laws,” Google continued. “Punishing a successful company that out-innovates its competitors for the benefit of consumers harms competition, not the other way around.”
Under the court’s instructions, the Justice Department and the states challenging Google also have until the end of the day to submit public versions of their post-trial materials. Closing arguments in the case are expected in May after a multi-week trial that wraps up in late 2023.