It earns billions of dollars a year by deceptively using people's personal information to participate in targeted digital advertising. While Google may have rightfully won the search advertising business, it competes unfairly and deceptively in the display advertising business, according to the state lawsuit. Google then states that the agreements cited by the Department of Justice are completely legal. These business-to-business agreements violate antitrust law only if they can be demonstrated to exclude competition.
Users can freely switch to other search engines, such as Microsoft's Bing or Yahoo Search, whenever they want, Google insists. Its search service, according to Google, is the undisputed market leader because people prefer it. It alleges that Google violated antitrust law by closing agreements with device manufacturers to make it the default search engine on their devices, a measure that blocked competition. Google has prevented any major search competitor from achieving vital distribution and scale, eliminating competition for most search queries in the United States.
The Department of Justice also investigated Google's behavior and acquisitions in the general digital advertising market, which includes search ads, web ads and video ads. In addition to the latest antitrust challenge, Google is facing an ongoing lawsuit from the Department of Justice and several states that allege that it used exclusion contracts to ensure the default state of its applications on the devices of manufacturers that used its Android mobile operating system. 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. Therefore, there are a number of exclusive agreements for Google to be the default search engine, and that has prevented competitors from offering their products instead.
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. 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. Most of the Justice Department lawyers involved in the investigation argued that they needed more time to present strong arguments against Google, although the then United States Attorney General, William Barr, is said to have overturned their guidelines, according to The New York Times. That, in theory, could close the market to rivals that collect less data for targeted advertising than Google.
They specifically denounce Samsung, the main manufacturer of Android phones, and say that Google has tried to buy the company by offering incentives to turn its Galaxy app store into a white label for the Play Store. Google is a limited liability company organized and existing under the laws of the State of Delaware, and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. 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. The government says that Google is illegally protecting its dominant position in the search and search engine advertising market with the agreements it has reached with companies such as Apple.
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