By: Heather Kelly (Washington Post)
Whether you want to look up facts about the moon or find the lowest prices on sweatpants, Google’s search engine is unavoidable. That’s a problem for consumers, said the U.S. government in a new, long-awaited antitrust lawsuit filed against the company Tuesday.
In the 64-page complaint, the Justice Department lays out its case against Google’s alleged search monopoly by focusing on one part of its business. It looks at all the deals Google has struck to be the path of least resistance for most consumers. Years of partnering with other companies, expanding its own line of products and user complacency have made it the default search engine on everything from our laptops to smartwatches.
Here are five interesting takeaways from the lawsuit.
Google’s search competitors aren’t very competitive
Google has a search monopoly, the lawsuit asserts, because it has 88 percent of the search market in the United States. According to the complaint, there are only three other search providers worth mentioning: Bing, Yahoo and the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo…
