Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination (Topic: Google Anti-trust Case)

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Google Anti-trust Case

The United States (US) government has filed charges against Google, accusing the company of violating competition law to preserve its monopoly over internet searches and online advertising.
The lawsuit marks the biggest challenge brought by US regulators against a major tech company in years.

The charges, filed in federal court, were brought by the US Department of Justice and 11 other states. Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina and Texas joined the Justice Department lawsuit.
The lawsuit focuses on the billions of dollars Google pays each year to ensure its search engine is installed as the default option on browsers and devices such as mobile phones.
Officials said those deals have helped secure Google's place as the "gatekeeper" to the internet, allowing it to own or control the distribution channels for about 80% of search queries in the US.
Other major tech companies including Apple, Amazon and Facebook are under investigation at both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.

Lawmakers and consumer advocates have long accused Google of abusing its dominance in online search and advertising.
The case filed in federal court in Washington, DC, alleges that Google uses billions of dollars collected from advertisers to pay phone manufacturers to ensure Google is the default search engine on browsers.
That stifles competition and innovation from smaller upstart rivals to Google and harms consumers by reducing the quality of search and limiting privacy protections and alternative search options, the government alleges.
The company owns the leading web browser in Chrome, the world’s largest smartphone operating system in Android, the top video site in YouTube and the most popular digital mapping system. Some critics have singled out YouTube and Android as among Google businesses that should be considered for divestiture.

A previous case of a similar magnitude forced Google to cough up huge fine amounts, in addition to introducing a change in the company’s AdSense policy after Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched legal action against the company in 2013.
Similar lawsuits against Google have emerged in Europe where the European Commission has imposed a fine of as high as EUR 4.3 billion in multiple cases including the one over the AdSense policies.
In July, Google’s Sundar Pichai was among the bosses of Big Tech companies appearing in the congressional session. Google was accused of leveraging its dominance on the internet to put down its competitors.
Google, whose corporate parent Alphabet Inc. has a market value just over USD 1 trillion, controls about 90 per cent of global web searches. Barring a settlement, a trial would likely begin late next year or in 2022.

In 2019, India’s antitrust body, Competition Commission of India (CCI), had held Google guilty of misuse of its dominant position in the mobile Android market and said the company had imposed “unfair conditions” on device manufacturers to prevent them from using other operating systems.
In February 2018, the CCI had fined Google Rs 136 crore for unfair business practices in the online search market. It said that Google had “allocated disproportionate real estate” for its affiliates, to the disadvantage of other companies that were trying to gain market access.
Google has challenged the CCI findings in forums such as the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal and the Supreme Court.
It was also found that Google has provided a further link in such commercial units which leads users to its specialised search result page (Google Flight) resulting into unfair imposition upon the users of general search services as well.