A federal judge Monday denied a motion by Apple to intervene as a defendant in a looming remedy trial for fellow tech giant Google and its monopoly over the Internet search market, reports Courthouse News.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Apple had waited too long to file their motion and granting the company’s request would cause significant delays to the case’s already packed schedule. Apple made the request on Dec. 23, 2024, seeking to defend its “property interest” in a billion-dollar exclusivity contract with Google that makes the search engine the default option on its Safari browsers across its devices.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta explained in his ruling that Apple’s motion was untimely and thus he must deny the motion to intervene. He said the tech giant should have known from the outset of the antitrust sui that the suit would “directly affect its contractual rights.”
On Aug. 5, 2024, Mehta ruled that Google had illegally monopolized the search market, “handing the government an epic win in its first major antitrust case against a tech giant in more than two decades. He said that the Alphabet unit’s US$26 billion in payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market.
Mehta said that Google’s agreements with Apple and other smartphone makers have a “significant effect” maintaining Google’s search monopoly, keeping other search engines from competing and reinforcing Google’s dominant position.
A 2023 New York Times report said Google paid Apple “around $18 billion” in 2021 to be the default search engine in Safari on Macs, iPads, and iPhones. The terms and effects of Apple’s deal with Google have become the centerpiece of the US v. Google trial.
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