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US v. Google: all the news from the search antitrust showdown

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Google lawyer: “Was anybody clamoring to preload Bing on these devices?”

Schmidtlein and Mehta are going back and forth over how much Google’s monopolistic conduct — particularly its exclusionary deals with companies like Apple — let it gather data that gave it an unfair leg up over other competitors, and whether without that conduct, other search engines would have become meaningful competitors. “We had witness after witness come in and say data helps improve search quality,” Mehta notes.

Schmidtlein counters that “there was no evidence that if Google was entering into non-exclusive agreements,” Apple and others would have actually wanted to cut deals with other search engines, or that those engines would have gathered much more data. “What is the alternate configuration of the device and what would that have done in terms of access to search queries?”

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