USA - Google on Friday urged a US judge to reject the notion of making it spin off its Chrome browser to weaken its dominance in online search.
Rival attorneys made their final arguments before US District Court Judge Amit Mehta, who is considering imposing "remedies" after a landmark decision last year that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search.
US government attorneys have called on Mehta to order Google to divest itself of Chrome browser, contending that artificial intelligence is poised to ramp up the tech giant's dominance as the go-to window into the internet.
They also want Google barred from agreements with partners such as Apple and Samsung to distribute its search tools, which was the focus of the suit against the Silicon Valley internet giant.
Three weeks of testimony ended early in May, with Friday devoted to rival sides parsing points of law and making their arguments before Mehta in a courtroom in Washington.
John Schmidtlein, an attorney for Google, told Mehta that there was no evidence presented showing people would have opted for a different search engine without the exclusivity deals in place.
Schmidtlein noted that Verizon installed Chrome on smartphones even though the US telecom titan owned Yahoo! search engine and was not bound by a contract with Google.
Of the 100 or so witnesses heard at trial, not one said "if I had more flexibility, I would have installed Bing" search engine from Microsoft, the Google attorney told the judge.
- 'More flexibility' -
Issued on eNCA | https://www.enca.com/business/google-makes-case-keeping-chrome-browser
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