A lawyer for the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has told a Washington district court that Google “monopolised internet search for a decade” at the start of a potentially precedent-setting legal case.

The anti-trust trial brought against Google by the DoJ in 2020, the first such case against the tech giant to go to trial in the US, got underway on Tuesday, with opening remarks attesting that in leveraging it power and wealth, Google stifled competition in the internet search space.

The court filing also claims that Google signed exclusivity deals with the likes of Samsung to make its search engine the default on the company’s handsets in a further assertion of its dominance. .

The DoJ has alleged that Google continues to monopolise key digital advertising technologies that website publishers depend on to sell ads and that advertisers rely on to buy ads and reach potential customers.

The lawsuit adds that over the past 15 years, “Google has engaged in a course of anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct” which it alleges “neutralised or eliminated” ad tech competitors through acquisitions and wielded its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products, thereby “thwarting the ability” to use competing products.

Through its lawsuit, the DoJ said it “seeks to restore competition in these important markets” and obtain “equitable and monetary relief” on behalf of the American public.

In opinion documents unsealed in August, presiding judge Amit P Mehta said the Google brand name had become ubiquitous to the extent that “dictionaries recognise it as a verb”.
He noted, however, that “a company with monopoly power acts unlawfully only when its conduct stifles competition”.

The trial is expected to last for up to 10 weeks and it is anticipated that Sunder Pikhai, chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, will take the stand in defence of the claims.

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