Google will face an existential threat on Monday while the United States government tries to break the company as a punishment for converting its revolutionary search engine into a ruthless monopoly.
The drama will take place in a Washington court room during the next three weeks during the hearings that will determine how the company should be penalized for operating an illegal monopoly in the search. The procedures, known in legal language as a “remedy audience”, present a witness parade that includes the Google CEO, SUCTAL Pichai.
The United States Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to order a radical shaking that prohibits Google to hit the billionaire agreements with Apple and other technological companies that protect their engine search engine, share their repository of valuable user data with rivals and for a sale of their popular Chrome browser.
The time of calculation comes four and a half years after the Department of Justice presented A historical demand Alleging to the Google search engine he had been abusing his power as the main internet entrance door to quell competition and innovation for more than a decade.
After the case finally went to trial in 2023, A federal judge last year ruled Google had been making anticompetitive offers to block its search engine such as the reference place for digital information on the iPhone, personal computers and other widely used devices, including those that are executed in their own Android software.
That historical ruling of the United States District Judge, Amit Mehta, establishes a high -risk drama that will determine the sanctions for Google’s misconduct in a search market that has defined since Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998.
Since that austere, Google has expanded far beyond the search to become an email power, digital mapping, online video, web navigation, smartphone software and data centers.
Taking advantage of his victory in the case of search, the Department of Justice is now preparing to demonstrate that measures must be taken to control in Google and his corporate father, Alphabet Inc.
“Google’s illegal behavior has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc on the market to ensure that, regardless of what happens, Google always wins,” the Department of Justice argued in documents that describe their proposed sanctions. “Therefore, the American people are forced to accept unbridled demands and changing ideological preferences of an economic leviathan in exchange for a search engine that the public can enjoy.”
Although the proposed sanctions were originally made under the mandate of President Joe Biden, the Department of Justice is still being accepted under President Donald Trump, whose first administration presented the case against Google. Since the change in administrations, the Department of Justice has also tried to launch Google’s immense power as a threat to freedom.
“The American dream is about higher values than only cheap goods and” free “services”, wrote the Department of Justice in a presentation of March 7 before Mehta. “These values include freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom to innovate and freedom to compete in a market without distortion by the controlling hand of a monopoly.”
Google is arguing that the changes proposed by the government are not justified under a decision that the popularity of its search engine among consumers is one of the main reasons why it has become so dominant.
The “unprecedented range of proposed remedies would damage consumers and innovation, as well as the future competition in search and search ads, in addition to many other adjacent markets,” said Google Lawyers in a presentation prior to the audiences. “They have little or no relationship with the behavior that is anti -competitive and are contrary to the law.”
Google is also playing alarms about the proposed requirements to share online search data with rivals and Chrome’s proposal sale presenting privacy and security risks. “The amplitude and depth of the proposed remedies runs the risk of doing significant damage to a complex ecosystem. Some of the proposed remedies would prevent browser developers and endanger the digital security of millions of consumers.”
The confrontation about the destination of Google marks the climax of the largest antitrust case in the United States since the Department of Justice demanded Microsoft in the late 1990s for taking advantage of its Windows software for personal computers to crush possible rivals.
The battle of Microsoft culminated in a federal judge declaring the company an illegal monopoly and ordering a partial breakup, a remedy that was finally revoked by an appeal court.
Google intends to present an appeal of Mehta’s decision last year that described its search engine as an illegal monopoly, but cannot do it until the remedy audiences are completed. After the closing arguments are presented at the end of May, Mehta intends to make his decision on the remedies before Labor Day.
The search case marked the first in a succession of antitrust cases that have been presented against a litany of technological giants that include goal Platforms from Facebook and Instagram Parent, which is currently fighting against accusations of administering an illegal monopoly on social networks on social networks. In another Washington DC trial. Other antitrust cases have been presented against both Apple and Amazonalso.
The Department of Justice also went to the Google Digital Advertising Net The decision of another federal judge That discovered that the company was also abusing its power in that market. That failure means that Google will go to another remedy audience that could once again raise the spectrum of a break at the end of this year or early next year.
