By Jan Wolfe and Miles Kruppa

A federal judge narrowed a major antitrust case against Alphabet's Google ahead of a trial that is slated to begin next month, rejecting an argument made by a bipartisanship group of 38 state attorneys general who sued the tech giant in 2020 over its search dominance.

In a decision unsealed on Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rejected a legal theory pushed by the state AGs in their Dec. 2020 lawsuit. But he allowed the Justice Department and the state AGs to make other arguments during the non-jury trial he will oversee starting in September.

Google handles about 90% of search-engine queries worldwide. The Justice Department sued Google in October 2020, alleging that the search giant maintains a monopoly "through exclusionary distribution agreements that steer billions of search queries to Google each day," including contracts that make Google the default search engine on Apple's Safari browser and Mozilla's Firefox browser.

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 04, 2023 14:41 ET (18:41 GMT)

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