WASHINGTON — The judge overseeing a pivotal antitrust trial focused on whether Google is stifling competition and innovation repeatedly indicated Thursday that he believes it would be difficult for a formidable rival search engine to emerge.
Google reaped an operating profit of nearly $96 billion last year, mostly by selling digital ads — a market that it also dominates largely because it controls about 90% of the U.S. internet search market.The judge also questioned how common it is for users to move away from the default search engines pre-installed on their smart devices. The default search option is a key question in the trial.
“Google is winning because it’s better,” Schmidtlein said. “Everybody who marched into this courtroom said Google was better.” “You can talk about competition but the competitor bears some responsibility for competing,” Mehta said.