Justice Department Sues Google For Violating Antitrust Laws

(RTTNews) - The Justice Department has filed an antitrust lawsuit against tech giant Google on Tuesday for violating anti-trust laws.

The DoJ alleges that Google unlawfully maintains monopoly through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets.

The Department of Justice along with eleven state Attorneys General filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The participating state Attorneys General offices represent Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas.

"As with its historic antitrust actions against AT&T in 1974 and Microsoft in 1998, the Department is again enforcing the Sherman Act to restore the role of competition and open the door to the next wave of innovation—this time in vital digital markets," said Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen.

The complaint alleges that Google has entered into a series of agreements that collectively lock up the primary avenues through which users access search engines, and thus the internet, by requiring that Google be set as the preset default general search engine on billions of mobile devices and computers worldwide and, in many cases, prohibiting preinstallation of a competitor.

Further, the complaint alleges that Google has unlawfully maintained monopolies in search and search advertising also.