Google has exploited its dominance of the internet search market to lock out competitors and smother innovation, the Department of Justice charged Tuesday at the opening of the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century.

“This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition,” said Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Department’s lead litigator. …

The Justice Department filed its antitrust lawsuit against Google nearly three years ago during the Trump administration, charging that the company has used its internet search dominance to gain an unfair advantage against competitors. Government lawyers allege that Google protects its franchise through a form of payola, shelling out billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on the iPhone and on web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.

[Microsoft ran into the same buzzsaw years ago over Internet Explorer. Users can change search engines in browsers but probably few bother to do so. I used to prefer Bing, but the surveillance aspects of it are similar to Google’s. I now use DuckDuckGo for most searches, but will occasionally use Bing to search for news articles, as their organization is better. I’m not sure that the real issue here is the search engine, but all of the other acquisitions they have accrued around it, like YouTube, which is far more of an operational monopoly than the Google search engine. — Ed]