Tag Archives: antitrust

WASHINGTON—Government antitrust cases challenging Google’s business practices are going to be a long road in court. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said Friday it will be almost three years before a trial begins in the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit alleging Google uses a web of exclusionary agreements and other tactics to preserve a monopoly for its flagship search engine and related advertising… Source link

Google now faces several antitrust challenges around the world, including three government lawsuits filed in the U.S. in the last two months alone. Scrutiny of Google has long preceded these cases, with the European Commission cracking down on the search giant well before U.S. regulators caught up. Google also faces a couple notable antitrust challenges from private complainants. Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., gestures while speaking during a discussion on artificial… Source link

It’s the same question asked by tech executives of an earlier era whose companies had also been accused of illegal monopolization — Kodak, Xerox, IBM, AT&T, Intel and Microsoft. And the honest answer, one that regulators and politicians rarely say out loud, is that when companies are so successful that they achieve dominance in their markets, then some of what they used to do — and what their rivals can still do — becomes illegal. At its core, antitrust law says that to save… Source link

The lawsuit marks the third competition case that U.S. regulators have filed against the search-and-advertising behemoth since October, reflecting the rising unease with Google’s massive profits and expansive reach — and the growing national dissatisfaction with Silicon Valley writ large. In the latest legal salvo, Democratic and Republican attorneys general from 38 states and territories led by Colorado and Nebraska took aim at a broad swath of Google’s digital empire. They claim that… Source link

Google was hit with another antitrust lawsuit on Thursday, as 35 states other other U.S. territories claim that the internet giant has stifled competition in its dominance of web search. “As the gateway to the internet, Google has systematically degraded the ability of other companies to access consumers,” the lawsuit states. “In doing so, just as Microsoft improperly maintained its monopoly through conduct directed at Netscape, Google has improperly maintained and extended its… Source link

The states said they worked closely with the Justice Department in their investigation. They interviewed hundreds of witnesses from Google and rival companies and collected more than 45,000 private documents as evidence. Thursday’s announcement reflects the deep interest among regulators around the world in Google’s signature search product. In Europe, regulators fined Google roughly $2.7 billion for privileging its own comparison shopping tool over those produced by independent websites…. Source link

Online advertising is expected to generate $42 billion in revenue this year for Google, which captures a third of all digital ad spending, according to an October projection from the firm eMarketer. Google’s vast reach led Texas and other state attorneys general to conclude in their lawsuit that the tech giant essentially had built the “largest electronic trading market in existence,” operating ad systems that are not unlike trades on a stock exchange. In that analogy, though, Texas… Source link

By Diane Bartz, Paresh Dave WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Texas and nine other states sued Google on Wednesday, accusing it of working with Facebook Inc in an unlawful manner that violated antitrust law to boost its already-dominant online advertising business.The states asked that the Alphabet Inc-owned company, which controls a third of the global online advertising industry, compensate them for damages and sought “structural relief,” which is usually interpreted as forcing a company to divest… Source link