WASHINGTON - Google begins a marathon battle in a federal court on Tuesday to fight accusations from the US government that it acted unlawfully to become the world's preeminent search engine.
Over the course of 10 weeks of testimony involving more than 100 witnesses, Google will try to persuade Judge Amit P. Mehta that the landmark case brought by the Department of Justice is without merit.
Held in a Washington courtroom, the trial is the biggest US antitrust case against a big tech company since the same department took on Microsoft more than two decades ago over the dominance of its Windows operating system.
The Google case centers on the government's contention that the tech titan unfairly forged its domination of online search by entering into exclusivity contracts with device makers, mobile operators and other companies that left rivals no chance to compete.
Through these payments of billions of dollars every year to Apple and others, Google secured its search engine default status on phones and web browsers, allegedly burying upstarts before they had a chance to grow.
That dominance has made Google parent Alphabet one of the richest companies on Earth, with search ads generating nearly 60 percent of the company's revenue, dwarfing income from other activities such as YouTube or Android phones.
"Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy start-up with an innovative way to search the emerging internet," the Justice Department said in its lawsuit. "That Google is long gone."
Dozens of US states, led by Colorado, have also joined the battle even though some of their arguments that Google illegally down-ranked sites such as Yelp and Expedia were tossed out pre-trial by Judge Mehta.