"Deal Book: What did Google do?", 21 October 2020.

The Department of Justice has filed its long-awaited antitrust lawsuit against Google, “the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation,” according to The New York Times...

The lawsuit targets the “cornerstones of Google’s empire,” its search tools. The Justice Department alleges that Google illegally protects a monopoly in search that harms competitors and consumers. Google pays companies like Apple billions of dollars to make its search engine the default option on their devices, shutting out rivals. Google then uses this grip to collect data from users that gives its search-based advertising business an unfair advantage, too.

More competition from other search engines, the Justice Department asserts, would force Google to compete on grounds that would promote better consumer protections in the digital age...

How Google responded: “People use Google because they choose to, not because they’re forced to, or because they can’t find alternatives,” wrote Kent Walker, the company’s chief legal officer, in a lengthy blog post...

“This legal case is going to be loud, confusing and will most likely drag on for years,” writes The Times’s Shira Ovide. And a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from states including New York, Colorado and Iowa said yesterday that they would conclude their own probe into Google “in the coming weeks.”...

Whatever the outcome, investors don’t seem worried: Shares in Google’s parent, Alphabet, rose yesterday, and are also up in premarket trading today. BCA Research ran the numbers on past antitrust cases and found that companies forced to break up outperformed the market after the judgments...