Topic for Sep 26 (Tue)

[Kristin55]

Google Faces Antitrust Trial Over Search Engine Dominance

It is the biggest antitrust trial in decades, as the US government takes on Google in Washington D.C.'s federal court, accusing the tech giant of illegally misusing its power to monopolize online searches.

In the 10-week trial, which began on September 12, lawyers from the US Justice Department are trying to prove that Google has been abusing the power of its search engine to stifle competition in ways that discouraged innovation.

Critics say the quality of search results has gotten worse, too, as Google used its engine to sell ads and promote its own products.

Google's legal team is expected to say that the company has never stopped improving its search engine, carrying out its original mission to organize the world's information and make it accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Despite commanding about 90% of the internet search market, Google argues that it faces a wide range of competition from other search engines such as Microsoft's Bing and DuckDuckGo and websites such as Amazon and Yelp, where people research questions about what product to buy or where to eat.

The Justice Department alleges that Google protects its franchise by spending billions of dollars every year to be the default search engine on the iPhone and web browsers such as Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox.

By locking in Google's search engine as the default choice in so many places, the Justice Department argues the company has made it more difficult for people to find the best results as quickly as possible.

Although Google products such as the Chrome web browser, Gmail, YouTube and online maps are all hugely popular, none have become as important — or as valuable — as the internet search engine invented by Google co-founder Larry Page and a fellow Stanford University graduate student, Sergey Brin, during the late 1990s.

Today, Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., is worth $1.7 trillion and employs 182,000 people, with most of the money coming from $224 billion in annual ad sales flowing through a network of digital services anchored by a search engine that deals with billions of queries a day.

1. Have you used any search engines besides Google? How did you find them?

2. Do you expect Google to remain the most dominant search engine for many years to come?

3. How often do you use Google to look things up?

4. Apart from the search engine, what Google products do you use the most?

5. Is your country home to many big tech companies?

6. Do you know anyone who works in the tech industry?