Judge Amit Mehta, who was appointed to his position on DC district court by former president Barack Obama, will decide the case - the biggest for the industry in 25 years.

The government’s lawsuit focuses on billions of payments Google has made to Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and others to be pre-installed as the default online search engine.

The US said Google typically pays more than $10bn a year for that privilege, securing its access to a steady gush of user data that helped maintain its hold on the market.

But by 2005, worried about its lead eroding, Google proposed to pay the company - later threatening to cancel payments if other firms got similar access, the government said.

Google said it faced intense competition, not just from general search engine firms, such as Microsoft’s Bing, but more specialised sites and apps that people use to find restaurants, airline flights and more.

“There are lots of ways users access the web, other than through default search engines, and people use them all the time,” the company’s lawyer, John Schmidtlein, said.

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