There was the time when Google was relatively young, and people who wish to visit Google visited other search engines first.
Like for example, going to Yahoo!, and then type "Google" on the search field, and then click on the first link that appeared on Yahoo!'s search results page. At that time, many people who were online during the early internet used Yahoo! as the portal to the World Wide Web.
This was why they thought that Yahoo! was the internet, and Google was just a website on the World Wide Web.
But gone are those days.
Google has grown so big that it can encompass and reach the entire web. It's brand name is already synonymous with the internet, and there is nothing that can stop it from doing what it wants, except when governments step in.
It's only through this time, that Google listens.
During a top European Union court, Google appeals a record EU antitrust penalty imposed for stifling competition through the dominance of its Android operating system.
The company is fighting a 2018 decision from the EU's executive Commission, which resulted in the €4.34 billion ($5 billion) fine.
While considered among the biggest ever Brussels has imposed for anticompetitive behavior, it's only one of the few antitrust penalties Google is having, which in total, account to more than $8 billion between 2017 and 2019.
And in the court, Google is saying that "Google" is Bing’s top search term,.
According to an evidence submitted by Alfonso Lamadrid, a lawyer for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, it is cited that Microsoft's search engine's popular search term is allegedly Google.
"We have submitted evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is by far Google," he said.
And this is proving that customers choose Google Search over competitors.
"People use Google because they choose to, not because they are forced to. Google’s market share in general search is consistent with consumer surveys showing that 95% of users prefer Google to rival search engines," Lamadrid said.
Google argues that being Bing’s top search result is proving that people use Google because they want to use Google. The same thing applies to Android and Google's bundling of its services with the Play Store.
Google suggests that Android phones isn’t the driving factor behind people using its services, as it's the people who actually prefer to use those services themselves.
The case focuses on Google and its abilities in controlling the competition.
While Google being the default choice for Android, the court wants to hear whether or not Google is leveraging its position as the default service to block other services from competing with it.
In its original decision, the commission said Google's practices restrict competition and reduce choices for consumers.
While the penalties involved huge sums, critics point out that Google can easily afford them all.
While Bing can be considered the "second best" search engine after Google, its market share is significantly lower.
It's suggested that Google is the most popular term on Bing, because Bing is the default search engine on devices running Windows 11 and below. It's likely that those Windows users type Google on the address to open Google.com.
In the court, Google also slams regulators for ignoring Apple.
"The Commission shut its eyes to the real competitive dynamic in this industry, that between Apple and Android," Google's lawyer Matthew Pickford told the court. "By defining markets too narrowly and downplaying the potent constraint imposed by the highly powerful Apple, the Commission has mistakenly found Google to be dominant in mobile operating systems and app stores, when it was in fact a vigorous market disrupter."
Pickford said Android "is an exceptional success story of the power of competition in action".
