US Justice Department Prepares Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google
Google now has to reckon with a serious conflict with the competition watchdogs in its home country too. It is about the same allegations that the group has already fined billions in Europe.
At the end of a 14-month investigation, the US Department of Justice is now preparing a lawsuit against the search engine operator, reports MSN and Business Insider. This involves allegations by various competitors that Google is abusing its dominance in the market in order to create an advantage for its own products with methods that other competitors cannot fall back on.
In the USA, too, where alternative providers of search engines were in a better position than in Germany, Google is coming meanwhile to around 90 percent market share in web searches. Most recently, the company benefited from a shift in usage habits to mobile platforms. Google is virtually omnipresent on these – be it because Android comes from in-house or because you secure the top position on Apple’s iOS with enormous financial resources.
No chance for third parties
“It is impossible for a small search engine competitor to keep up with Google’s financial strength and outbid the market leader, for example, in order to get a lucrative position like the standard search in Apple’s browser,” said Gabriel Weinberg, head of DuckDuckGo, in his complaint to the US – Department of Justice explains. The Ministry of Justice’s competition oversight authorities have come to the conclusion that Google has built up such a strong monopoly that it can no longer be cracked through competition between products alone.
In addition to cementing the dominant market position, its impact on other services also plays an important role in the process. Because the search engine does not refer to similar services on an equal footing. For example, when users search for a specific restaurant on Google, its location is usually only presented via Google Maps. Other card services do not have a chance to come into play here as well. The situation is similar to various other services that Google operates in addition to a web search.
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