The US will Sue Google for Monopoly in Internet Searches

The United States Government plans to announce a lawsuit against Google for a monopoly in the internet search and ad markets. It could lead to a legal war and the most massive antitrust case in recent decades.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit will argue that Google maintains its role as the main gatekeeper of access to the Internet through an illegal network of exclusive agreements to stop its competitors. The daily newspaper cited sources from the Department of Justice.

It will accuse Google of using billions of dollars collected from ads on its platform to pay phone companies and other search engines to keep it as their basic search engine.

In recent years, different governments, and organizations, such as the European Union, criticized technology giants. This occurred because of the large amount of power they accumulate, the exorbitant benefits they obtain and the low taxes they pay.

US authorities and the country’s Federal Trade Commission closely watched the tech giant company. The latter one also has the power to investigate monopoly cases and already has led to carry out investigations around Google. However, it ended them in 2013 without sufficient evidence.

• Check-out Financebrokerage’s Comprehensive Review on Uptos

Google spent a lot of money on digital advertising

In 2007, Google bought DoubleClick, a digital ad vendor, for $3.1 billion. At that time, Google was ten times smaller and competing with Yahoo and Microsoft. However, the deal allowed the company to monetize search much more effectively than the competition. Since then, the company bought rival ad vendors, including AdMob, Invite Media, Admeld, Applied Semantics, and Sprinks.

Google monopolized travel deals

In 2010, the company paid $700 million for ITA Software. It licensed a tool for finding flight deals to travel search engines like Hotwire and Orbitz. Before this purchase, Google didn’t have a travel product. Afterwards, it developed Google Flights, which keeps searches for travel deals on its platform.

One operating system to rule them all

Google purchased Android in 2005 for $50 million. The deal brought the tech giant continued dominance in the search and digital advertising markets. 

Mobile devices have been the fastest growing source of global search traffic, and Android runs on seven out of every ten mobile devices globally. That saturation allowed google to cut deals with smartphone makers and cell carriers. The company established itself as the default search engine on most of the world’s devices.