The U.S. government presented its main arguments against Alphabet’s Google on Thursday, concluding the evidence phase of a legal battle in which it accused the online search leader of violating antitrust laws to stay at the top, according to Reuters.

In the lawsuit, which began on September 12, the Justice Department sought to prove that Google created a monopoly and illegally abused its power to promote its financial results.

Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said he was undecided about his decision. “I have no idea what I’m going to do,” he said after announcing the latest pleas in early May.

The case brought by the Trump administration was the first of four aimed at punishing tech leaders.

A second case, against Meta, was also brought during the Trump administration, while Biden’s antitrust authorities brought a second case against Google as well as against Amazon.com.

Google vs. Bing

MIT economics professor Michael Winston, the government’s final witness on the final day of the trial, addressed the main points of the government’s case.

He disagreed with Google’s view that it had to compete with Microsoft for exclusive pre-installed software on smartphones. Google’s payments to Apple and others totaling $26.3 billion in 2021 were essentially monopoly profits paid to distributors, he said.

“Google made a lot of money from these contracts,” he said.

Alphabet’s net profit for July-September amounted to $19.69 billion against $13.91 billion in the same period last year. Total revenue for the quarter was $76.69 billion.

Winston said Google has the market power to raise ad bids without losing advertising, citing the company’s experiments. “Each time they’ve found it’s profitable to raise prices,” he said.

Winston argued that Google’s nearly 90 percent market share in the US meant it had little incentive to improve quality.

“If there is no competitive threat, I do not make such investments. And the quality is lower,” Winston said.

John Schmidtlein, Google’s attorney, also reiterated one of Google’s main defense arguments during the trial – that the payments were legitimate revenue-sharing agreements that resulted from competition and were intended to ensure that mobile phone and smartphone manufacturers would contribute relevant updates and will keep user data secure.

He also noted that Google is popular because of its quality. He pointed to reviews of smartphones such as the Samsung Fascinate that show consumers were unhappy when Microsoft’s Bing was the phone’s default search engine.