Today, US District Judge Amit Mehta heard opening statements for the Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust case challenging Google's search dominance.
Only Mehta will decide whether Google has maintained its role as the world's search leader by competing on its own merits — as Google claims — or through anticompetitive behavior that the DOJ alleges.
DOJ's Kenneth Dintzer initiated the process. He told Mehta that the Justice Department plans to prove that since 2007, Google has illegally maintained monopoly power in the search and advertising markets, focusing on "rigging" the default search engine on mobile devices.
To prove this, the DOJ plans to bring in Hal Varian, who served as Google's chief economist at the time. Another key witness will be the co-founder of the now-defunct search engine Neva, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who will testify about the obstacles Google still poses to new search providers today. Dintzer said most of the Justice Department's witnesses will be former and current Google employees and others with a financial interest in Google's conduct.
Much of the opening statement was a rehash of the pretrial filings the DOJ and Google filed last week. The gist of the Justice Department's position is that Google regularly blocks search competitors and prevents any innovations that could make web search "faster, easier and better for consumers."
Mehta asked Dintzer to clarify a few points so he could understand how long Google has illegally maintained monopoly power (more than a decade, the DOJ said) and how much of Google's search traffic comes from setting its engine as the default (50 percent).
Worryingly, though, during the opening remarks, Amit Mehta seemed a bit confused by some of the reports, and was unable to figure out whether Firefox's Mozilla is program browsing or search engine. He also didn't know how they work tools SEM by Google.
