Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies in a House antitrust hearing earlier this year.

The antitrust complaint filed by the U.S. Justice Department against Google on Tuesday morning spotlights the difficult position in which Yelp, Expedia and many other companies find themselves, competing with the search giant while simultaneously relying on and paying the company to direct customers to their services.

In essence, the Justice Department alleges that Google uses its dominant position to its unfair advantage as a “monopoly gatekeeper for the internet.” It seeks “structural relief,” aka a breakup of the company, among other remedies to prevent Google from engaging in what the government deems is anticompetitive behavior.

Google called the lawsuit “deeply flawed” and “dubious” in a post responding to the suit.

“People use Google because they choose to, not because they’re forced to, or because they can’t find alternatives,” it says. “This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers. To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use.”

The parallels to the landmark antitrust case against Microsoft, more than two decades ago, are so striking that they’re referenced explicitly in the complaint. Here’s a passage from the introduction to the suit against Google:

Back then, Google claimed Microsoft’s practices were anticompetitive, and yet, now, Google deploys the same playbook to sustain its own monopolies. But Google did learn one thing from Microsoft—to choose its words carefully to avoid antitrust scrutiny. Referring to a notorious line from the Microsoft case, Google’s Chief Economist wrote: “We should be careful about what we say in both public and private. ‘Cutting off the air supply’ and similar phrases should be avoided.” Moreover, as has been publicly reported, Google’s employees received specific instructions on what language to use (and not use) in emails because “Words matter. Especially in antitrust law.” In particular, Google employees were instructed to avoid using terms such as “bundle,” “tie,” “crush,” “kill,” “hurt,” or “block” competition, and to avoid observing that Google has “market power” in any market.

In an interesting twist, Google cites modern-day Microsoft as one of its defenses in its post, with the graphic below.

“Google doesn’t come preloaded on Windows devices,” Google says in its post. “Microsoft preloads its Edge browser on Windows devices, where Bing is the default search engine.”

Columbia University law professor Timothy Wu told CNBC that the lawsuit against Google “is almost an exact copy of the Microsoft case.”

At the GeekWire Summit last week, Bill Gates commented on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee inquiry into Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, saying the government would be smarter to take on the companies individually and focus on the specific issues related to them, rather than grouping them together.

“It should be about, how can consumers benefit through competition that furthers innovation, and a little less about demonizing the specific people involved.” Clearly thinking back to his own antitrust battles, Gates added with a laugh, “But maybe that’s my personal view that others don’t share.”

Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern will speak at the GeekWire Summit today, and this is one of the topics we’ll bring up. Kern has been outspoken about Google in the past, saying earlier this year, “I think Google’s a problem — it’s a problem for everyone who sells something online, and we all have to struggle with that.” Expedia has yet to issue a statement on the case today.

Yelp said in a post that “self-serving bias by Google happens literally billions of times per week in the United States. By systematically reducing the quality of its search results in order to entrench and extend its search and search advertising monopolies, Google is directly harming consumers.”

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