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Former St. Louis judge: 'There's money involved in Google lawsuit'

ST. LOUIS RECORD

Friday, November 22, 2024

Former St. Louis judge: 'There's money involved in Google lawsuit'

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Missouri residents could stand to gain financially now that Attorney General Eric Schmitt has joined a Department of Justice lawsuit against Google for alleged antitrust violations.

“There's money involved,” former St. Louis Judge Michael Wolff said. “We’re talking economic debt damages.”

The antitrust lawsuit filed last month in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeks to prevent the popular browser from improperly gaining a corner on the market through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices, according to a press release.

“The Google case does impact consumers within the state of Missouri in a way that is fairly direct,” Wolff told the St. Louis Record

Other participating states include Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas.

“Google, through its monopoly on search functions, controls a huge amount of the information that Americans access every single day,” said Attorney General Schmitt in a statement online. “This kind of concentration of power is alarming, and it’s critical that we ensure that even the biggest of big tech companies, including Google, are acting responsibly, and are held accountable when they aren’t.”

However, Google has responded that the lawsuit was "deeply flawed."

“People use Google because they choose to, not because they're forced to, or because they can't find alternatives,” Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, said in a statement online. “This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers. To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use.”

According to the Oct. 20 complaint, exclusionary agreements have blocked the channels through which users access search engines and Google has unlawfully sustained search and search advertising monopolies.

“In the United States, advertisers pay about $40 billion annually to place ads on Google’s search engine results,” wrote attorney Ryan A. Shores on behalf of the United States in the lawsuit. “It is these search advertising monopoly revenues that Google 'shares' with distributors in return for commitments to favor Google’s search engine. These enormous payments create a strong disincentive for distributors to switch. The payments also raise barriers to entry for rivals—particularly for small, innovative search companies that cannot afford to pay a multi-billion-dollar entry fee.”

The lawsuit estimates that Google has a market value of $1 trillion.

“If it's true that Google is violating antitrust laws so as to disadvantage consumers generally, well a lot of those consumers are in the state of Missouri and so presumably the Attorney General of Missouri would have an interest in being involved in litigation against Google,” Wolff said.

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