close
close

Google's legal assessment ahead of new antitrust dispute

The next antitrust trial against Google is set to begin on Monday. After years of mostly prevailing against regulators and competitors, the technology giant is entering its latest court battle with an increasingly shaky legal track record.

Google's luck in U.S. courts ran out in December, when a federal jury ruled in favor of video game developer Epic Games and its antitrust lawsuits against Google's operation of its app store. Eight months later, a federal judge sided with the Justice Department, saying Google had broken the law by manipulating the search market.

The company had already faced legal problems in Europe, where regulators had filed antitrust cases against it years before its American rivals. But the August ruling by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which Google said it would appeal, could pave the way for more private lawsuits against Google and, if it results in the breakup of the search engine giant, shake up the entire technology industry.

Now the company is facing another lawsuit from the Justice Department, this time claiming it broke the law to improve its advertising technology systems and must be forced to divest the division. Google argues the government's lawsuits fail to take into account the significant competition in the advertising market from companies like Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. The trial in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, is expected to last more than a month.

José Castañeda, a Google spokesman, said the company has “a long tradition of defending the quality of its products and services so that people can access them safely and easily.”

“In the past year alone,” he added, “we have won dozens of cases around the world and have litigated and supported successful cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Here’s how Google performed in other high-profile cases:

Result: A Google victory

Before the Justice Department filed two antitrust lawsuits against Google, the company's biggest legal battle was with a Silicon Valley competitor. Software giant Oracle filed suit in 2010, claiming Google had infringed patents and copyrights by using Oracle's programming language to build the Android mobile operating system without permission.

The two companies fought in court for more than a decade until the Supreme Court intervened three years ago. In a 6-2 decision, the judges found that Google was allowed to use the programming language within the framework of so-called fair use and had not infringed Oracle's copyright.

Result: A Google victory

In 2004, Google began scanning and digitizing more than 20 million books from major research libraries. Users could search the archive, called Google Books, and were given directions on where to buy or borrow the texts. The Authors Guild and several authors opposed this initiative and sued the company in 2005, arguing that it was a massive copyright infringement.

The legal battle ended in 2016 when the Supreme Court agreed with an appeals court that the project was a fair use of the authors' work.

Result: An agreement

In 2007, YouTube, the video platform owned by Google, faced a legal threat that could have effectively shut it down. Viacom, a cable giant that owned MTV and Comedy Central, sued YouTube for copyright infringement. Angry that users were uploading its content to the platform without permission, Viacom demanded $1 billion from YouTube. It was an important test of whether a video platform could be held responsible for the content uploaded by its users.

After seven years, the companies reached a settlement and agreed to work more closely together.

Result: Unresolved

Google faced a challenge to legal protections that protect social media companies over the content posted by their users. The company was sued by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old student killed in terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. The family's lawyers argued that YouTube recommended Islamic State videos to interested viewers, helping to spread the group's ideology.

Last year, the Supreme Court declined to hold Google liable in the case and remanded the case to a lower court with instructions to consider another high court ruling that Twitter was not responsible for Islamic State content on its platform. While the case is ongoing, the decision was seen as a victory for Google.

Result: A loss for Google

Google suffered an antitrust setback in December when a jury in federal court in San Francisco found that the company violated antitrust laws to charge fees and limit competition from Epic Games and other developers in its Play mobile app store.

Epic had argued that Google was damaging the business prospects of game makers and other developers by imposing strict rules. After three hours of deliberations, the jury ruled in Epic's favor, putting further pressure on Google to allow more competition on its Android operating system.

Google has repeatedly stated that it will appeal the ruling.

Results: Multiple Google losses

Google has fared even worse in European courts. The company has lost three antitrust cases on the continent that alleged Google broke rules to promote its Android mobile operating system, its shopping service and an advertising business. European authorities have fined Google more than 8 billion euros, or $8.7 billion, in the cases – all of which are ongoing.

You may also like...