Vs v. Google: What both parties have argued in a hearing to solve the search monopoly

In the past three weeks, the Ministry of Justice and Google have interviewed more than two dozen witnesses to try to influence the decision of a federal court about how the illegal monopoly of the company can be tackled in internet research.

On Friday it is expected that this hearing will be closed in the American court for the district or Columbia. To repair the monopoly, the government has proposed aggressive measures Including the forcing of Google to sell its popular Chrome -Webbrowser and share his own data with competitors. Google has argued that little tweaks To his business practices would be better appropriate.

Both parties offer concluding arguments at the end of the month. Judge Amit P. Mehta, who is chairman of the case, is expected to make a decision by August. His statement could have important implications for Google, his rivals and the way in which people search online information.

This is what you need to know about what was argued during the hearing.

Which case does the hearing come from?

In August, judge Mehta ruled that Google had violated the antitrust legislation When companies such as Apple, Samsung and Mozilla paid billions of dollars to appear automatically as the search engine in browsers and on smartphones. He also ruled that Google’s monopoly allowed it to increase prices for some search advertisements, which contributed to the unfair benefit.

Judge Mehta met the hearing last month to determine how the search monopoly can best be tackled through measures called remedies. Managers from Google, rival search engines and artificial intelligence companies – in addition to experts – testified about the electricity from Google via the internet.

What has the government argued?

The only way to end Google’s dominance is to take considerable action, said government lawyers during the hearing.

Lawyers argued that Google should be forced to spin Chrome and share search results and advertisements with rivals, allowing them to populate their own search engines. Other search engines and some artificial intelligence companies must have access to data about what Google users are looking for, as well as the websites on which they click.

During the hearing, the government warned that if Judge Mehta would not take action, Google could continue in dominance of another technology, artificial intelligence. Searching is in revolution because AI and chatbots, such as Google’s Gemini, change the way people find information on the internet.

“The remedy of this court must look ahead and not ignore what is on the horizon,” said David Dahlquist, the main process of the government. “Google uses the same strategy that they have done to search and now applies it to Gemini.”

Eddy Cue, an Apple director who was called by Google as a witness, said that “in the past two months for the first time in more than 20 years” Google Search Queries had fallen for the first time in the company’s safari browser. He attributed the decrease in the growth of AI

What has Google argued?

Google’s lawyers said that the government’s proposal would endanger products where consumers and the privacy and security of the empire keep for browsing on the internet.

“I think it will have absolutely many unintended consequences,” tested Sundar Pichai, the Chief Executive of Google.

Sharing Google’s data with its competitors would undermine the privacy of its users, the company’s lawyers said. They pointed several times on an incident from 2006 in which AOL released search data to help academic researchers. Journalists could use leaked data Identify an individual Based on her searches.

There is also a lot of competition in AI, they said and recorded the success of OpenAi’s chatgpt and other examples.

Google’s lawyers, instead, suggested that its contracts with web browsers and smartphone companies should offer more freedom to work with competing search and AI services. Mr Pichai testified that Google had already started changing his contracts with other companies to be in accordance with his proposal in the case.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAi and his partner, Microsoft, for infringement of the copyright of news content with regard to AI systems. They have denied misconduct.)

What have other companies said?

During the hearing, various Google competitors, including OpenAi and the Chatbot Company Perplexity, said they would be open to buying Chrome if it was offered for sale. Witnesses from the government said that access to the search and advertising data from Google AI companies would give an advantage because they tried to compete with Google.

What did the judge say?

When judge Mehta interviewed Witnesses during the hearing, he gave a window on his thinking.

Sometimes he urged witnesses to say whether rivals could compete with Google’s search dominance without the intervention of the court.

Many of his questions revolved around AI and its meaning, because Google fights against his rivals to develop the technology that has become an important force in the technical industry.

When Mr. Pichai was on the witness bank, Judge Mehta said he had observed the rapid development of AI since the lawsuit was tried in the autumn of 2023, indicating that he was aware of how the growth of the technology had become the background for the hearing.

“One of the things that I noticed, Mr. Pichai, is about this procedure, when we were together not so long ago, the consistent witness of the witnesses was that the integration of AI and searching if the impact of AI on a search was gone for years,” he said, referring to witness during the 2023 test. “By the time we got here today, things have changed dramatically.”