It won an early victory against antitrust litigation over allegations that it exploited the dominance of its Maps software to lock application developers into the Google ecosystem and force them to use other necessary services. For years, Google has accounted for nearly 90 percent of all search queries in the United States and has used anti-competitive tactics to maintain and expand its monopolies in search and search advertising. The District Court for the District of Columbia will prevent Google from illegally maintaining monopolies through anti-competitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets and to remedy damage to competition. Google is a limited liability company organized and existing under the laws of the State of Delaware, and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
But antitrust law is not just about being big, but about conspiring to limit trade or create a monopoly. Google has prevented any major search competitor from achieving vital distribution and scale, eliminating competition for most search queries in the United States. We should compare Google with Amazon, and pretty much the entire Internet, because, you know, you can buy things or search for things not just with Google. Decades ago, the Department's case against Microsoft recognized that antitrust laws prohibit anticompetitive agreements between high-tech monopolies to require a pre-installed default state, close distribution channels to rivals, and make software unable to be eliminated.
By filing the lawsuit, the Department seeks to stop Google's anti-competitive behavior and restore competition for American consumers, advertisers and all companies that now depend on the Internet economy. Having up-to-date data on user search queries is key to the success of a search engine, all lawyers from the Department of Justice, the states and Google agreed. Google contracts form the basis of the Department of Justice's historic antitrust lawsuit, which alleges that the company has tried to maintain its monopoly on online searches in violation of antitrust laws.
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