• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, July 26, 2024

The search advertiser California Crane School will ask a federal appellate court to revive claims that Google conspired with Apple to avoid competing in the paid-search business.

California Crane, which trains crane operators, filed a notice of appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday, but has not yet made substantive arguments in the matter.

The move comes in a legal battle dating to 2021, when California Crane alleged that Google's longstanding arrangement to serve as the default search engine in Apple's Safari was part of a conspiracy to avoid competition. California Crane contended that the alleged conspiracy resulted in higher prices for search ads.

U.S. District Court Judge Pitts in the Northern District of California threw out the claims against Apple, and sent the claims against Google to arbitration because its contract with advertisers requires arbitration of disputes.

Pitts said in a March ruling that California Crane's allegations -- even if true -- wouldn't prove to be a violation of antitrust laws.

“Google’s dominance in the search and search advertising markets alone is insufficient to allege that Google and Apple are engaged in a horizontal antitrust conspiracy, as its dominance could rationally be attributed to a number of other market factors,” Pitts wrote.

California Crane subsequently asked Pitts to reconsider the ruling in light of information that emerged during an antitrust trial against Google in federal court in the District of Columbia.

In that matter, the Department of Justice and a coalition of states argued that Google wrongly became dominant in search by contracting to be the default search engine in Mozilla's Firefox browser and Apple's Safari browser, and arranging for its search engine to come pre-installed on Android smartphones.

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, who presided over that trial, has not yet issued a decision.

Pitts rejected California Crane's bid last week for several reasons, including that the evidence that was introduced in the government's case against Google wouldn't have changed the outcome of California Crane's complaint.

“The court was already aware of the ... relationship between Google and Apple based on the revenue-sharing agreement related to Google being the default search engine on Apple’s devices,” Pitts wrote.