Competition: US justice plans lawsuit against Google

Text by: Agnieszka Kumor

The American justice system is in the process of completing the investigation into Google’s potentially anti-competitive advertising practices. For a possible trial in the fall?

Publicity

The investigation has been conducted since June 2019 by the Justice Department as well as fifty attorneys general under the leadership of that of Texas, the Republican Ken Paxton. She focused in particular on Google’s technological tools, essential in relations between publishers and advertisers.

According to the economic daily The Wall Street Journal , the American justice seeks to know if Google abuses a dominant position vis-à-vis its competitors and users. Thus, 90% of online research is done using Google and especially 70 to 75% of advertising revenue related to research goes into the pocket of the flagship of the Alphabet.

Microsoft's shadow

The Google affair resembles in all respects that of the Microsoft empire. By imposing its Windows operating system on the personal computing sector, Bill Gates' company had effectively excluded all competition, in particular that of free or open source software. For this, the group had been the target of competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1990s and 2000s, with a lawsuit in the United States and a series of disputes which had resulted in heavy fines in Europe. In addition, to avoid the lawsuit brought by AOL-Time Warner, owner of the web browser Netscape, Microsoft, accused of having favored its Internet Explorer, agreed to pay $ 750 million to end the lawsuits.

Like Microsoft, Google has established itself over the past few decades as one of the tech giants. But its anticompetitive practices disturb and interest more and more the justice. In Europe, the group has been pinned three times in the space of two years. The last dates back to March 2019 when the EU sanctioned it with a fine of 1.49 billion euros for abuse of dominant position of its AdSense advertising network. This fine followed that of 2.4 billion euros inflicted in 2017 in the Google Shopping case, and that of 4.34 billion euros in 2018, related to the Android operating system .

Sanctioned in Europe, Google found itself on the radar of the federal authorities. So far the search engine has escaped trial. In 2012 and 2013, the group had signed amicable agreements, for a fee, with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and with 38 American states to end prosecutions on different aspects of its activities. Since then, many have been asking the FTC to reopen the case. It is now done. According to Attorney General Paxton, the investigation against Google could lead to a trial as early as the fall.

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• Justice
• Internet
• Google
• United States