Google’s dominance of search engines faces trial

US regulators to conduct 10-week antitrust case featuring high-level testimony

The U.S. government is taking aim at what has been an indomitable empire: Google’s ubiquitous search engine that has become the internet’s main gateway.

The legal attack will swing into full force Tuesday in a Washington, D.C., federal courtroom that will serve as the battleground for the biggest U.S. antitrust trial since regulators went after Microsoft and its dominance of personal computer software a quarter-century ago.

The 10-week trial before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is expected to include potentially revelatory testimony from top executives at Google and its corporate parent Alphabet, as well as other powerful technology companies. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Google co-founder Larry Page in 2019, will be among the most prominent witnesses likely to testify.

The trial is scheduled to continue into late November before its first phase wraps, after which another round of court filings and arguments are expected. Mehta isn’t expected to issue a ruling until early next year. If he decides Google has been breaking the law, it will trigger another trial to determine what measures should be taken to rein in the Mountain View, California, company.

Although Google products such as the Chrome web browser, Gmail, YouTube and online maps all are hugely popular, none have become as indispensable — or as valuable — as the internet search engine invented by Page and a fellow Stanford University graduate student, Sergey Brin, during the late 1990s.

Today, Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., is worth $1.7 trillion and employs 182,000 people, with most of the money coming from $224 billion in annual ad sales flowing through a network of digital services anchored by a search engine that fields billions of queries a day.

Nearly three years after filing its antitrust lawsuit during the Trump administration, lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department will try to prove Google has been abusing the power of its search engine to stifle competition in ways that discouraged innovation. Critics say the quality of search results has deteriorated, too, as Google used its engine to sell ads and promote its own products, like Google restaurant reviews instead of those offered by Yelp.

The Justice Department’s argument will boil down to its contention that Google’s search engine has become like digital air that almost everyone breathes, and that it needs to be cleaned up because the company’s tactics pollute the atmosphere.

Google is expected to counter that the company has never stopped improving its search engine, executing its original mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Despite commanding about 90% of the internet search market, Google argues it faces a wide range of competition ranging from other search engines, such as Microsoft’s Bing, to websites such as Amazon and Yelp, where people research questions about what product to buy or where to eat.