In the case brought by the DOJ and eleven state attorneys general, it was said that Google shut out competitors by making exclusive deals with tech platforms.
“It will affect a lot of other cases as well and whether we can really use the antitrust laws to rein in Big Tech,” said Kathleen Bradish,
The trial is expected to last 10 weeks, and a number of high-level tech executives are set to testify.
The DOJ said in its opening comments on Tuesday that Google began illegally keeping a monopoly in the search engine space as early as 2010.
“Defaults are powerful, scale matters,” said Kenneth Dintzer, who is spearheading the DOJ’s case on this trial, according to Reuters.
The DOJ said that the tech giant spends more than $10 billion a year to make sure that its search engine is the default one on devices.
Google, on the other hand, says its search dominance is a result of success in market competition.
This is the biggest antitrust trial against a big tech company in the United States in decades.