Washington (AFP)

By launching a lawsuit against Google for abuse of dominance on Tuesday, US authorities launched the largest legal action in nearly 20 years against one of the country's technological pillars, foreshadowing possible legal actions against the other giants of the tech, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.

"This morning, the Department of Justice and 11 states brought a civil action against Google for unlawful monopoly pursuit of its general search services and its search advertising services in violation of US competition laws," said in a statement William Barr, the United States Minister of Justice.

"Google is the gateway to the internet," ministry number two Jeffrey Rosen told a press conference.

But the group "has maintained its monopoly through practices aimed at excluding and harming competition".

The ministry accuses Google in particular of forcing consumers and advertisers to use its search engine on mobile devices running Android, its operating system, via applications that cannot be deleted, which considerably restricts competition.

The complaint, filed with a federal court in Washington, calls for "structural" changes at Google, and therefore suggests a possible dismantling of parts of the giant of online search.

"We are not ruling out any option, but the question of remedies will have to be decided by the court after hearing our arguments," said Ryan Shores, senior adviser for the technology industry at the Justice Department.

The lawsuits could last for several years.

- "Doubtful" complaint -

Google called the complaint "dubious".

"People use Google by choice and not because they are forced or because they can not find alternatives", defended Kent Walker, a vice president of the Mountain View (California) group, in a statement.

"We are not in 1990, when changing services was long and complicated, and required the purchase and installation of software with a CD-ROM", he laughs, before mentioning many applications. ultra popular like Spotify, Amazon or Facebook which are not installed by default on smartphones.

He also reminds that his services are free and therefore benefit the greatest number.

But Google, like its neighbors in Silicon Valley (Apple and Facebook) and Seattle (Amazon and Microsoft), has been causing almost allergic reactions for two years in a growing number of American elected officials.

Conservatives accuse them of political bias and progressives worry about breaches of competition law, their hold over personal data and the growing inequalities associated with their rise.

Together, the five companies are worth more than $ 7 trillion on the stock market, up from just over $ 2,000 billion five years ago.

"Today is a stage, not the finish line," insisted Jeffrey Rosen.

"We will continue to review the behavior of major digital platforms"

Republican Senator from Missouri Josh Hawley, very critical of "Big Tech", welcomed the lawsuits, saying it would be "the lawsuit for abuse of dominance the largest in a generation."

- Motivations -

The date of the announcement, two weeks before the US presidential election, has sparked much criticism of the ministry's real motivations.

The lawsuits were "rushed on the eve of an election where the administration is aggressively lobbying tech companies to act in its favor. Competition law should be guided by consumer interests. and not for political reasons, "reacted Matt Schruers of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a group close to the big names in the sector.

The attorneys general of the 11 states associated with the prosecutions (Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas and Montana) are all Republicans.

But the announcement of the prosecution has also been welcomed on the left, and various investigations have been launched on GAFA since 2019, in particular by the agency in charge of consumer protection (FTC), a bipartisan parliamentary committee and prosecutors of the almost all American states.

In 2013, the FTC spared Google, after two years of investigation, already on the subject of competition.

Europe has been less lenient: in 2018, the group synonymous with the Internet was fined 4.3 billion euros from the European competition authorities for unfair practices in the Android ecosystem.

To achieve victory in court, the US government will need to successfully prove that Google's monopoly practices harm consumers.

Similar accusations were made in the late 1990s against the computer group Microsoft.

In 2001, after nearly three years of proceedings, the Ministry of Justice had almost succeeded in dismantling the firm.

© 2020 AFP