Tech giant Google is in court for being the best search engine on the Internet. Well, not exactly for being the best, but for allegedly using underhanded tactics to maintain its lofty position on the search engine market. The Department of Justice is the key prosecutor suing the tech giant in court for making huge unrecorded payments to certain companies.
“While many fingers are crossed for the outcome of this case, the result is sure to have a rippling effect on the future of search engines and the internet in general,” says David Brenton, a Washington, DC-based digital marketing guru with blusharkdigital.com. One wonders what would happen if Google lost the case, but that might be a fantasy.
This article summarizes the case as each major player steps up to testify against Google in the biggest court case involving tech giants since 1988.
The Trial in Bits and Pieces
John Schmidtlein, the lead lawyer for Google, opens the case by asserting that Google leads the search engine market because it is simply “a superior product.” He supports this theory by stating that users can “easily” change the default search engine on any device. This supports his theory of Google being a superior product – users decide to use Google’s search engine, making it the favorite worldwide.
Antonio Rangel, an economist from the California Institute of Tech, challenges this idea. He states that switching between Google and other search engines takes more than just clicking a button. The process takes more than ten steps, which is why users do not bother to do it anyway. In this age of short attention spans, ten steps are a lot of steps.
Google (former staff)
A former long-time software engineer of Google, Eric Lehman, takes the stand. Having worked in the SEO department, he reiterates that “everyone knows more clicks influence rankings.” This has never been so clearly stated before by Google or any search engine, and Eric Lehman says this without confirming it. He then avoids the follow-up question by saying “We try to avoid confirming that we use user data in SEO.”
Bing
Mikhail Parakhin, senior staff at Microsoft, testifies in court that Microsoft’s mobile search is inferior to Google’s. He adds that this is because all efforts to increase Microsoft’s stake in this sub-niche have been unsuccessful. This highlights how much of the market Google owns. Businesses prefer to work with Google simply because of high user traffic.
DuckDuckGo
Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, informs the court how pointless it is to change a device’s search from Google. If any step is not completed properly, the search engine switches back to Google.
If any step is skipped, it returns to default, which is Google. Gabriel Weinberg made these comments in response to Google’s claim that changing a device’s search from the default is “easypeasy.”
Branch Metrics
Alex Austin, founder of Branch Metrics, accuses Google of making the search engine landscape unfair. He cites companies preferring to do deals with Google not because the terms are fair, but because it is Google. His company had a plan to create a mobile search engine utilizing deep-linking technology to serve app pages to users. While this was very profitable to mobile device companies, the idea was rejected because these companies already had existing deals with Google.
Microsoft
CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella strongly opposed the idea that there are alternate choices when it comes to search engines. He stated that “all everyone knows is Google,” adding that every other company in the niche is a low-share player. He also adds that “everyone calls it the Internet, but it is simply the Google web.”
Conclusion
Much unfolded as the trial concluded, but a lot of evidence concerning how Google held the biggest share in search engines was uncovered. Between default search deals, potential anticompetitive conduct, and Google’s not-so-strong defense, there is cause for concern for Google. The court seems to sway on the side of Google’s competitors, but major cases like this in the U.S. are never easy to predict.