The U.S. Justice Department will launch an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Tuesday for alleged engagement in anticompetitive conduct to preserve monopolies in search and search advertising, according to The Wall Street Journal. The case is expected to be filed in a Washington D.C. federal court.
- The Justice Department alleges that Google is maintaining its internet gatekeeper status through an unlawful web of exclusionary and interlocking business agreements that shut out rivals.
- Department is concerned that Google uses billions of dollars obtained from platform advertisements to pay mobile-phone makers, carriers, and browsers to maintain Google as the default search engine.
- The Justice Department lawsuit questions Google’s arrangement in which search applications are preloaded and cannot be deleted on the android operating system’s mobile phones.
- Google attracted scrutiny as it gained power but avoided scrutiny by the state.
Google’s lawsuit will be the most aggressive challenge to a company’s dominance in the tech sector over two decades. GOOGLE: NASDAQ is down 0.25%
