Google: the search engine in the US antitrust viewfinder
These are the 38 US states that made the accusations: Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona, Iowa, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Alaska, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Delaware, Guam , Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Virginia, West Virginia, Wyoming, Washington and Vermont. They form a bipartisan group led by Attorney General Phil Weiser (Democrat, Colorado) and Doug Peterson (Republican, Nebraska).The document (the third of its kind since early 2020) refers to anti-competitive behavior relating to the search engine implemented in order to favor the products of the group to the detriment of the alternatives of third parties. Below is an excerpt in translated form.
Google positions itself as the crossroads of so many areas of our digital economy and has used its dominance to enslave competitors, monitoring nearly every aspect of our digital lives and drawing profits for billions.
The dynamics taken into consideration are no different from the one that has ended several times and for a long time also in the crosshairs of the European authorities. The reply of the Mountain View group has been entrusted to the pages of the official blog with a post signed by Adam Cohen (Director, Economic Policy) in which the evolution of the service and of the ways of composing the SERPs over the last twenty years is traced.
We know that oversight of large companies is important and we are prepared to answer questions and solve problems. However, this lawsuit wants to redesign the search engine to deprive Americans of useful information and damage the ability of businesses to connect directly to customers.
Kent Walker, Senior Vice President of BigG's Global Affairs has made it known through the overseas press that the company plans to challenge the decision.
People use Google because they choose to do so, not because they are forced or because they cannot find alternatives. This lawsuit does nothing to help users.
Source: Document Cloud