Five things to know about the Google antitrust trial as it hits halfway mark

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The U.S. government is near the halfway mark in its court battle with Alphabet's Google, which it has accused of breaking antitrust law with the tactics it used to dominate online search and some aspects of advertising.

In the trial that started on Sept. 12 and is scheduled to go to about mid-November, the Justice Department accused Google of manipulating online auctions - a multibillion dollar industry dominated by Google - with these formulas to favor its own bottom line.

Here are five important points raised so far during the trial:

Witnesses from Verizon, Android maker Samsung and Google itself testified about the company's estimated $10 billion in annual payments to ensure that its search is the default on smartphones and browsers. CEOs of two privacy-oriented search engines, DuckDuckGo and Neeva, argued that these defaults hurt their businesses. Neeva shut down this year.

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Google's James Kolotouros, who negotiated search distribution agreements with Android device makers and carriers, testified the agreements gave Google search exclusivity, and Google monitored compliance with them.

Google executive Adam Juda said that it used a formula to determine Long Term Value - including ad quality - to determine which advertiser would win the quarter-second auction to place an ad in front of a user. Advertisers are not told their LTV, and Google uses "tunings" to adjust the price of ads, he said.

Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer for UM Worldwide, testified that Google dominated the market for ads placed alongside searches and has increased prices in the last 10 years. Google's vice president and general manager of ads, Jerry Dischler, acknowledged that Google earned more than $100