Google responded on Tuesday to the Trump administration’s antitrust lawsuit against it with a snide presentation, countering the government’s allegations with one-liners.
On Tuesday morning, the Justice Department filed a historic and long-anticipated antitrust lawsuit against Google over its allegedly anti-competitive business practices, especially the use of its search dominance in the online advertising arena to defeat its competitors.
The agency said in a press call that Google had maintained its monopoly in large part by paying mobile phone manufacturers and carriers billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine on hundreds of millions of cellphone devices.
The tech company defended its decision to pay for its service to be the default choice on devices by claiming that it is a common practice in many industries and that its competitors, Yahoo! and Bing, also pay to be prominently featured on internet browsers.
“Just like a cereal brand might pay a supermarket to stock its products on a shelf at eye level, we pay to promote our services, as do countless other businesses,” Google SVP of Global Affairs Kent Walker said in a blog post response to the lawsuit.
Google said that it was very easy for consumers to choose another search engine if they wanted to.
“This isn’t the dial-up 1990s when you needed to purchase a CD-ROM from a store to access alternative services or wait forever for a 28.8 bps modem,” wrote Walker.
“Today, you can easily choose your own search engine or download an app in a matter of seconds,” he wrote. “The DOJ is wrongly claiming Americans aren’t sophisticated enough to do this.”
Google controls over 80% of general search engine queries in the U.S., in part because almost all users use the default search platform available on their devices, the DOJ said.
Phones that use Google’s Android software platform cannot pre-load their search engine to an alternative if they want to benefit from a revenue-sharing agreement with the company. Android users can change their search engine to another one if they so choose after they purchase a phone.
Google claimed that consumers simply preferred its search services in comparison with its competitors, as evidenced, for example, by Apple featuring Google in its Safari browser because Apple CEO Tim Cook said in 2018 that Google is “the best.”
“This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers,” Google said in the blog post. “To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use.”
