The U.S. Justice Department today filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google LLC accusing the company of harming the competition in the search and search advertising markets.

Google has pushed back against the suit, calling it “deeply flawed” in a statement. 

The Justice Department is being joined by 11 state attorneys general in the litigation. Court documents seen by The Wall Street Journal reportedly suggest that more states could potentially come aboard in the future.

The lawsuit, which follows a more than yearlong investigation, charges that Google signed exclusivity agreements with key players in the tech industry to lock competitors out of growth opportunities. Google is alleged to have inked deals with Android device makers that forced them to preload its search engine on their handsets and forbade them to do the same with rival services. In some cases, the Justice Department says, the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary also required device makers to prevent its search app from being deleted.

Another part of the suit focuses on Google’s relationship with Apple. The suit charges that the search giant inked long-term agreements with Apple that make it the default and de facto exclusive search engine provider in the Safari browser, as well as other Apple search tools.

Lastly, Google is accused of using “monopoly profits” to buy preferential treatment for its search engine on various platforms. 

The lawsuit makes the argument that Google’s alleged unfair boosting of its service “foreclosed any meaningful search competitor” from achieving the scale it would need to become a serious rival. The result, Justice Department posits, is less choice for consumers. Officials also believe that Google, thanks to its leading position in the search market, has the power to charge advertisers more than it could if the market had more competition.

“As with its historic antitrust actions against AT&T in 1974 and Microsoft in 1998, the Department is again enforcing the Sherman Act to restore the role of competition and open the door to the next wave of innovation — this time in vital digital markets,” Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said in a statement.

Google responded to the news by issuing a lengthy blog post with several arguments against the suit. “Today’s lawsuit by the Department of Justice is deeply flawed,” Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, wrote in the post. “People use Google because they choose to, not because they’re forced to, or because they can’t find alternatives.”

Google’s Walker also addressed some of the specific points raised by the Justice Department. Notably, the executive wrote that “our agreements with Apple and other device makers and carriers are no different from the agreements that many other companies have traditionally used to distribute software. Other search engines, including Microsoft’s Bing, compete with us for these agreements.” The executive also noted that Google doesn’t come preinstalled on Windows 10.

Axios reported that the Justice Department is seeking “structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm.” That means officials may argue in court that parts of Google may have to be split off or reorganized.

Concurrently, a bipartisan group of state attorneys general is currently pursuing a separate antitrust investigation into Google. New York Attorney General Letitia James said today that seven of the participating states may file a lawsuit against the company in a matter of weeks.

The legal battle over Google’s antitrust status will likely be closely watched amid the growing regulatory scrutiny of other tech titans such as Facebook Inc. and Apple. Both of the latter companies are said to be facing multistate investigations as well over their business practices. 

But the full consequences of the Justice Department’s suit against Google may not become apparent for quite a while. It’s believed that the legal skirmish could potentially take years to play out given the slow pace of past antitrust litigation efforts that focused on large tech companies. 

Photo: Unsplash