Google is so successful that it’s the most searched for term on Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine, the company lawyers revealed while making their appeal against a $5bn fine levied against it by the EU for anticompetitive ”illegal practices” relating to its Android operating system.
The tech giant has asked EU judges to overturn a record $5 billion fine and strike down a 2018 antitrust order that said Google unfairly pushed its search app on mobile phones running its Android software. The European Commission alleged that Google made a strategic decision to squeeze out potential rivals and build near-monopoly market shares.
EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had used its clout to ensure Android phones were “locked down in a Google controlled ecosystem” and that the company paying manufacturers and operators to keep competing search engines off Android phones “obstructed the development of competing mobile operating systems which could have provided a platform for rival search engines to gain traffic”.
Alfonso Lamadrid, a lawyer for Google’s parent company Alphabet pushed back against such claims: “People use Google because they choose to, not because they are forced to”, he said, as reported by Bloomberg. “Google’s market share in general search is consistent with consumer surveys showing that 95% of users prefer Google to rival search engines.”
According to data from SEO company Ahrefs, Google is indeed the top global search for Bing users. In the United States specifically, it is the third top search – beaten by “Facebook” and “YouTube”, but the European Union has made numerous attempts to try and regulate a fairer market for search engine choice. In 2020 it made Google implement an auction on Android for other companies to pay to be a more visible option for the default search engine.
However, the move was criticised by privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo who described it as ‘pay-to-play’ and incentivising profits over privacy.
As for whether this helps or hurts Google’s argument, that’s really for the judge to decide. It’s just funny that, at least in part, Microsoft’s default search may have helped Google make its argument against the massive fine proposed for its default search.
