Googles dominance makes competition unlikely, U.S. antitrust trial judge says – National [Video]

The judge overseeing a pivotal U.S. antitrust trial focused on whether Google is stifling competition and innovation repeatedly indicated Thursday that he believes it would be difficult for a formidable rival search engine to emerge.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta went back and forth with Google’s lead litigator, John Schmidtlein, during the first day of the trial’s closing arguments, questioning whether another company could amass the money and data needed to develop a search engine that could eventually compete against Google.

“It seems to be very, very unlikely, if not impossible, under the current market conditions,” Mehta said. He added that it appeared odd to him that there is a marketplace where Google is making billions of dollars in profit yet nobody “is trying to enter into the market to cut into that profit.”

Google reaped an operating profit of nearly $96 billion last year, mostly by selling digital ads — a market that it also dominates largely because it controls …