Proactive Investors - Google faced a grilling by judge Amit P. Mehta alongside justice department officials on Thursday as arguments were tabled in a landmark US antitrust lawsuit.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)-owned Google has been sued by the government department over claims it has illegally shored up a monopoly in online search.
Mehta questioned both sides as the first day of closing arguments got underway in the case, which is said to be the most influential for the technology sector since Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) was sued by the US government in 1990.
He probed whether the government’s stance that Google’s dominance had hurt the consumer’s experience was really true.
“[It’s hard to] dispute that search today looks a lot different than it did 10 to 15 years ago,” Mehta said.
This came after government suggestions that Google did not need to innovate given some 90% of searches are conducted through its engine.
“It seems [...] a hard road for you to go down for me to conclude that Google hasn’t innovated enough,” he added.
Mehta also questioned Google’s defence that it was not a monopoly, however.
The tech giant had argued that it didn’t dominate online search since people also used the likes of Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) and TikTok to find products.
“Certainly I don’t think the average person would say, ‘Google and Amazon are the same thing,’” he said.
Questions were also asked how another company could possibly grow to rival Google, given its search engine is the default browser on Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s Safari.
Billions of dollars would need to be spent on development, he pointed out, and even more set aside to pay Apple, with the judge also probing why Google had to pay to be a default search browser given its own claims of being simply “better” than rivals.
Mehta’s ruling is expected over the coming months to weeks and is likely to set a precedent for how the government tackles growing dominance in the technology sector.