Google is taking a counter-initiative tact in its antitrust battle with the European Union, by pointing out that the top search term on Microsoft’s Bing search engine is ‘Google.’
Although this would seem to prove that Google has an anticompetitive advantage, Google posit that this actually shows that, even when confronted with an alternative search engine, users are choosing to use Google as their preferred search engine.
This is why Google is responsible for over 90 per cent of worldwide searches, according to this reasoning.
“We have submitted evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is by far Google,” Google lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid told the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg.
“People use Google because they choose to, not because they are forced to.”
This isn’t the first time Google has used this argument: CEO Sundar Pichai made the same point in 2018, with European regulators issued its $5 billion fine regarding Android’s market dominance.
He countered this decision with the blog post “Android has created more choice, not less”, which argued, “Rapid innovation, wide choice, and falling prices are classic hallmarks of robust competition and Android has enabled all of them.”