A key question in Google's trial: How formidable is its data advantage?

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Google.

The government claims that Google bribed and bullied smartphone producers such as Apple and Samsung and the browser-maker Mozilla to be their featured search engine, funneling far more data to Google and cutting off competitors.

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Data, the government says, drives the flywheel of Google's success. Each search query adds data, which improves search results, attracting more users who generate still more data and advertising revenue. And Google's ever-growing data advantage, the government asserts, is an insurmountable barrier for rivals.

Data is «oxygen for a search engine,» Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Department's lead lawyer, declared in his opening statement Tuesday.

The government's case is not that Google violated the law in becoming a search giant. Instead, the government claims that after Google became dominant, the company broke the law with its tactics to defend its monopoly. Contracts with industry partners to be their default search engine were the weapon — exclusive deals that froze out rivals, the government claims. So Google is now protected from competition behind a fortress built with data.

Google replies that the government's case is an artifice of misleading theory unsupported by the facts. The government has chosen to «ignore inescapable truths,» John Schmidtlein, Google's lead lawyer, asserted in his opening statement.

Those truths,