Google, Justice Department make final arguments about whether search engine is a monopoly

WASHINGTON — Google’s preeminence as an internet search engine is an illegal monopoly propped up by more than $20 billion spent each year by the tech giant to lock out competition, Justice Department lawyers argued at the closings of a high-stakes antitrust lawsuit. “It would be an unprecedented decision to punish a company for winning on the merits,” Google’s lawyer, John Schmidtlein, said late Friday afternoon in summation of the company’s closing arguments. Justice Department lawyers have said the huge sum is indicative of how important it is for Google to make itself the default search engine and block competitors from getting a foothold. “It should be the market deciding what the price increases are.” Dahlquist said internal Google documents show that the company, unencumbered by any real competition, began tweaking its ad algorithms to sometimes provide worse search ad results to users if it would increase revenue.