In a lengthy post on Google’s website on Tuesday, Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs, set out the company’s response to the Justice Department’s lawsuit, which he labeled “deeply flawed."
“This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers,” Mr. Walker wrote. “To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use.”
The post detailed Google’s rebuttals to the suit:
Google’s agreements with Apple and other device makers and carriers to surface its search product were no different from those that many other companies have, it said. “Other search engines, including Microsoft’s Bing, compete with us for these agreements,” Mr. Walker wrote.
Consumers are using Google because they want to, not because they have to, the company said. It said other search engines, such as Bing or Safari, were easily available for download if people chose to use them instead.
Mr. Walker said in the post that the lawsuit was wrong about how Americans use the internet. “It claims that we compete only with other general search engines. But that’s demonstrably wrong. People find information in lots of ways: They look for news on Twitter, flights on Kayak and Expedia, restaurants on OpenTable, recommendations on Instagram and Pinterest,” he wrote.
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