Google has told a European Union court in Luxembourg that people use Bing and other rival search engines to arrive at its search engine. Google’s lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid made this assertion to counter the charge that Google uses unwholesome techniques to dominate search queries and the search market, Arstechnica reports.
Lamadrid stated that consumers all over the world choose to use Google search engine because it is good, fast, and reliable. He made it clear that despite the fact that Bing is the default search engine on Microsoft devices, people still use Bing to come to Google before performing internet searches. He stated that no one is forced to use Google, but consumers use the search engine because they choose to.
“People use Google because they choose to, not because they are forced to,” Google’s defense lawyer Lamadrid said. Google’s market share in general search is consistent with consumer surveys showing that 95% of users prefer Google to rival search engines. We have submitted evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is, by far, ‘Google.'”
According to a survey by Statcounter, Google dominates the internet search market by 92% while Bing comes far behind at 2.48%. Lamadrid argued that Bing is installed by default on Edge browser while Internet Explorer is on old versions of Windows operating system, yet consumers use these search engines and others in the market to come to Google.
Google made this defense to the EU in response to a 2018 lawsuit where the European Commission imposed a $5 billion fine on it for alleged antitrust activities.
Analysts however argued that Google is not being entirely truthful with its dominance tactics. Analysts established that Google pays Apple an estimated $15 billion every year to remain the default search engine on iOS devices. And that an estimated $400 million is paid every year to Mozilla, Chrome’s rival search engine, to remain the default search engine on Firefox browser.
Apart from the antitrust litigation against Google in the EU, the search engine giant is also facing similar lawsuits in the United States and other parts of the world. In 2018, 36 US states filed a class lawsuit challenging Google’s abuse of its Play Store market, while other regulators are also investigating the company’s Google Assistant exclusive dominance on Android devices.
