Google said on Monday that it had not used its multibillion-dollar deals with other large tech firms to protect its position as the dominant online search engine, in the company’s first formal rebuttal to the Justice Department’s accusations that those deals violated antitrust laws. The filing, a 42-page document, is a paragraph-by-paragraph — and sometimes sentence-by-sentence — denial of the claims made by the government and a group of states that have joined its lawsuit. In the filing, Google says it “developed, continually innovated and promoted” its search product as part of its mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”“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,” the company said. The filing is Google’s most significant so far in its antitrust battle with the Justice Department, but it will be far from its last. The judge hearing the case, Amit Mehta, said last week that the trial would not start until 2023.

Source: New York Times December 21, 2020 23:48 UTC