• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, November 7, 2024

Google on Wednesday asked a federal judge to throw out an antitrust lawsuit by web users who claim the company's monopoly in search allowed it to return lower quality results, and also give short shrift to privacy concerns.

In papers filed Wednesday with U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco, Google argues that the plaintiffs didn't offer any specifics that would support their claims regarding poor search results or privacy protections.

“Nowhere do plaintiffs point to any facet of search quality that has been rendered 'inferior' from Google's alleged misconduct,” Google writes.

“What specific innovations would have occurred but did not?” the company asks.

“What quality improvements would have materialized?” Google continues. “The [complaint] fails to say.”

The company also says the complaint “fails to furnish factual allegations to support its vague and conclusory assertions” regarding the “better user-privacy protections that plaintiffs have been supposedly missing out on.”

The new papers come in a lawsuit brought in April 2022 by Mary Katherine Arcell and around two dozen other search engine users. They claimed that Google monopolized search by arranging to serve as the default search engine for Apple's Safari and on Android devices. The suit came almost 18 months after the U.S. Department of Justice brought similar antitrust claims against Google in Washington, D.C.

U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila in California dismissed the search users' complaint last year, ruling that the plaintiffs hadn't shown how they may have been harmed by the alleged antitrust violations.

Arcell and the others subsequently filed a revised complaint that included additional allegations about Google's search engine -- including claims regarding Google's use of data.

Earlier this year, Lin -- who took over the case from Davila -- again dismissed the complaint, writing that the revised allegations were conclusory and speculative.

But she said at the time that U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta's ruling against Google in the lawsuit brought by the government might give the plaintiffs more fodder to once again revise their complaint. Lin noted that Mehta flagged DuckDuckGo as a privacy-protective search engine that couldn't compete effectively due to Google's search distribution deals, and a lack of access to data.

Arcell and the others then again amended their allegations by incorporating some of Mehta's findings -- including that Google's monopoly in search hindered competitors with more privacy protections, like DuckDuckGo.

Google counters in its newest papers that the plaintiffs haven't been injured because Duck Duck Go operates today, and can be used by Arcell and the others.

The company is asking Lin to now dismiss the complaint with prejudice, which would prevent the users from again attempting to revise their allegations.

The matter is scheduled for a hearing on December 10.