Google’s antitrust trial set for September 2023

SAN RAMON, Calif. — The U. S. government’s attempt to prove Google has been using its dominance of online search to stifle competition andinnovation at the expense ofconsumers and advertisers won’t go to trial for nearly three years.

U.S. District Judge Amit MehtaonFriday set a tentative trial date of Sept. 12, 2023, for the landmark case that theJusticeDepartment filed two months ago.

“This dispels the notion that we would go to trial quickly,” saidMehtaduringa conferencecallwithgovernment and Google lawyers to go over the ground rules for exchanging confidential documents and deposing top Google executives.

He estimated that once the trial begins, it will last about 5 ½ weeks in his Washington, D.C., courtroom.

The prolonged wait for the trial underscores the complexity of a case seeking to defuse the power of a startup that sprouted froma SiliconValley garage in1998 andevolvedinto a$1 trillion companywhoseservices are regularly used by billions of people around theworld.

Between now and the trial’s opening, reams of documents peering into Google’s inner workings andits dealswithAppleand other well-known companies are expected to be examined.

Many of the documents will be kept confidential, while othersmaybe publicly released and peel back the curtain on the way Google operates. Mehta is also allowing sworn depositions of eight Google executives for up to 14 hours each. The identities of those Google executives haven’t been determined yet. Google’s currentCEO, SundarPichai, aswell as two formerCEOs, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, are among the leading candidates to be deposed about the company’s strategy and dealings.

Googlehasfiercelydenied thegovernment’sallegations that it has illegally struck a series of deals to thwart competition in the search marketto help give it a strangleholdona digitaladvertising market that has brought in more than $100 billion in revenue to the company during the first ninemonths of this year alone. The company’s staunch insistence that it has done nothing wrong makes a pretrial settlement seem unlikely.

With the trial still years away, Google will conceivably become an even more imposing force before the federal government and the attorneys general in dozens of states get their day in court. Anotherantitrust case filed Thursday is seeking to preempt Google’s dominance in other still-emerging fields of technologysuch as voice-activateddevices in the home and internet-connected cars. That case is likely to be combined with the Justice Department’s