By Diane Bartz WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department on Monday questioned a Verizon executive about the company's decision to always ...
By Diane Bartz WASHINGTON - The U.S. Justice Department on Monday questioned a Verizon executive about the company's decision to always pre-install Google's Chrome browser with Google searchHalifax Urban Folk Festival on both sides of the harbour | SaltWireWASHINGTON - The U.S.
The government argues Google's $10 billion in payments annually to mobile carriers and others helped the California-based tech giant win powerful default positions on smartphones and elsewhere, which fed data into other lucrative parts of its business, such as online advertising. Antonio Rangel, who teaches behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology, testified last week that people are likely to stick with defaults like search engines or map apps on computers and mobile phones. This would show why Google would want to pay to have the default, or exclusive, position to win more search queries and make higher profits advertising on them.
One leg of Google's defense is that its high market share reflects the quality of its product rather than any illegal actions to build monopolies in some aspects of its business.