Are competitors disadvantaged? Lawsuit against Google expected in early October

09/30/2020, 11:46 am No time right now? Save now and read later

Google is now coming under increasing pressure in the US too. The US Department of Justice could bring a lawsuit for violations of competition law in the coming week.

The US Department of Justice has been investigating the practices of the big tech giants Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook for months. Google is likely to be the first of the corporations to answer in court. Next week, the alphabet daughter to be confronted with a formal complaint to the Ministry, such as Reuters, citing familiar with the matter People reported .

Violation of competition law

It is expected that the lawsuit will, on the one hand, focus on possible violations of competition law. The question is whether Google deliberately disadvantages competitors like Bing by withholding important data about users and their surfing behavior. Bing and co. Would need this data to improve their own services and to attract new users in a targeted manner.

The advertising business is meanwhile arguably the second main topic of the upcoming lawsuit. Here, the criticism of the US authority is aimed specifically at the advertisements controlled by Google on the search results pages. According to Reuters, prosecutors in several US states are currently considering joining the lawsuit. According to observers, the lawsuit coming against Google could be one of the largest of its kind since the 1990s – and have a signal effect for the entire tech industry .

In contrast to the USA, Google has already been sentenced several times in Europe to sometimes severe penalties for violating competition law. Based on such a decision, Google is currently offering users of Android smartphones, for example, the choice of three alternative providers for mobile search . So far, however, this has hardly helped the competition.

Google rejects allegations

So far, Google has denied any allegations by the US authorities. When it comes to searching for information, users could switch to other platforms such as Twitter for news or Amazon for products, according to Google. As far as marketing is concerned, Google is in competition with a large number of companies such as Oracle or Verizon.