On September 12, the first and highly anticipated antitrust case against Google’s search market dominance will begin. In a new insight, Director of Technology and Innovation Policy Jeffrey Westling outlines the arguments both the plaintiffs and Google will make and assesses their strengths and weaknesses.

Key points:

• The Department of Justice and a bipartisan group of attorneys general from 38 states and territories will argue that Google violated federal antitrust law by illegally monopolizing search and search advertising markets.
• To win at trial, the plaintiffs will need to show both that Google has monopoly power in a relevant market and engaged in anticompetitive, exclusionary conduct to either gain or maintain that monopoly power.
• While Google certainly enjoys a successful search business and has entered into agreements with browsers and mobile-device manufacturers to promote its own search engine, fierce competition from rival search engines and the significant procompetitive justifications for those agreements may counter the plaintiffs’ case.

Read the analysis