Just a week after commemorating Google’s 25th birthday, the tech giant will face hard questions from the U.S. government about how it orchestrated its dominance of internet search.to the tech giant’s history: He wrote about Google’s unlikely successes , name-checked its flops , and recounted its struggles through the years as it “faced hard questions about our future as a company.”
The showdown, U.S. et al v. Google, is the first competition trial of the modern internet era, the most notable tech antitrust case since Microsoft faced off with federal prosecutors more than 20 years ago. But back then, when theof using its market dominance in PCs to unfairly bolster its Internet Explorer browser, the world was only just getting online.
According to the DOJ’s original lawsuit, Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook met in 2018 to discuss how they could work together to drive revenue. After the meeting, an Apple employee wrote to a Google employee,"Our vision is that we work as if we are one company." The DOJ alleged at the time that almost half of Google's search traffic came from Apple devices. The agreement is so important that Google views losing it as a “Code Red” scenario, the lawsuit said.
Google weathered those criticisms for years and remained massively successful. The company processes around 90% of all online searches in the US. That vast market share is the foundation of Google's juggernaut advertising business, which generates the majority of the company's $280 billion in annual sales, and has vaulted it to a $1.7 trillion market cap.
While the case is a landmark legal battle, it’s less expansive than it originally was—a major victory for Google leading up to the trial. In August, Judge Amit Mehta, who is presiding over the trial in the District of Columbia, significantly narrowed the scope of the case because, with some arguments, the government had not “demonstrated the requisite anticompetitive effect” to show Google violated the law.