Google Highlights Bing and DuckDuckGo in Defense Against Antitrust Lawsuit
“People use Google Search because they choose to, not because they are forced to.”
Back in October, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a long-awaited antitrust lawsuit against Google, claiming that the company has exhibited monopolizing and anti-competitive behavior, and now the tech giant has issued its first formal response.
In a 42-page document listing out all its arguments for dismissing the lawsuit, Google contends almost every paragraph and sentence in the Justice Department’s original filing, which calls the tech giant “a monopoly gatekeeper for the Internet,” and attacks its deals with various mobile service providers to make Google their default search engine.
Responding, the company says that “People use Google Search because they choose to, not because they are forced to or because they cannot easily find alternative ways to search for information on the internet,” pointing to the existence of Bing and DuckDuckGo. It also argues that its deals with service providers are akin to consumer brands buying preferable shelf space in grocery stores, and that both Apple and Android users can easily switch their preferred search engines to other competitors if they wished to do so.
The Department of Justice has yet to respond to the new filings from Google, so stay tuned as the story develops.
Elsewhere in tech, OPPO has teamed up with nendo to create an innovative “Slide-Phone” concept.
