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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust One example of a company that has faced antitrust charges in the past five years is Google, which was charged by the U.S Department of Justice and eleven states with unlawfully maintaining its monopoly on general internet search services and search adverting through anticompetitive practices in October 2020. The lawsuit alleges that Google used exclusive agreements to block competition from other search services, such as Yahoo or Bing; tied its own products into existing contracts; and acquired competitors to maintain its power over online searches and advertising prices.

The DOJ argued that these practices harmed industry participants, including publishers and advertisers, by depriving them of competition for their business in an open market; reducing options for consumers seeking information about products and services; distorting what users saw on the internet; artificially inflating prices for advertisers, who passed along their higher costs to consumers in the form of higher retail prices for items such as flights or cars; stifling innovation within the digital economy; and foreclosing potential opportunities for rivals to develop new technologies or introduce new products into the marketplace. Google countered this argument by claiming that it had not violated any antitrust laws because it believed that its actions were pro-competitive rather than anti-competitive, meaning they benefited consumers overall. In particular, they claimed that their guiding principle of “putting customers first” meant providing users with better results more quickly at lower cost than if there were multiple competing platforms offering different search results with varying quality levels. Ultimately though, Google settled with both the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and 11 states involved in December 2020 when it agreed to pay $2 billion in fines—the largest settlement ever made under federal antitrust law—in exchange for changing some of its practices going forward so as not reduce competition among rival companies offering search engine services online.