The Google Trial: Is Google Trying to Mislead the Internet? An Open Court Motion Proposed by Sundar Pichai
There is an amount of proof the government must show to show that Google hurt competition. Its case centers on claims that Google illegally orchestrated its business dealings to ensure that it’s the first search engine people see when they turn on their phones or computers.
At least 10 other people are expected to be called by the company. The trial is expected to last until the end of November. There’s no jury and the presiding judge will give a final ruling in the bench trial.
Around 90% of the U.S. market for search engines is controlled by one entity, namely, the internet giant, Google. The company is expected to argue that people aren’t forced to use the search feature because it’s the default browser. People can switch from one browser to another without having to make a change, but they’re not allowed to stay in it.
Pichai has a deep history with Google’s search engine business. He’s expected to testify that Google has worked to achieve the best search product for consumers, and that has only helped to serve competition.
When he first joined the company in 2004, his job involved working on the Google search toolbar. He later led the team that built the company’s Chrome browser, which predominately features Google search front and center.
Over the next three weeks, Google will continue to hit on this idea as it began its defense last Thursday. And there are few people more qualified to talk about its search products than CEO Sundar Pichai.
“Microsoft has failed to invest, failed to innovate in a manner comparable to Google, in many areas that have nothing to do with scale,” Schmidtlein said.
Though the topic of antitrust may sound bland, the Google trial has experienced its fair share of intrigue. There’s been allegations of document destruction and details about billion dollar deals between the world’s richest companies. The government brought around 30 witnesses to testify – including experts, psychologists and top executives from Apple and Microsoft – aiming to prove Google broke the law.
It became so pervasive that The New York Times and other major news organizations filed a court motion imploring the judge to ensure the case was conducted in an open courtroom.
There was information in court but a lot was presented in the closed room. The four hour testimony was closed to the public. Throughout the course of the trail, Google continually fought to seal documents and shutter proceedings in public court.
Executives from other smaller search engines, like DuckDuckGo and Neeva also testified that Google’s exclusive deals effectively quashed their potential to gain market share.
There is a misconception about the nature of the open web, but in reality it is actually a product of the search engine industry, he said. “The distribution advantage Google has today doesn’t go away.”
The Justice Department called dozens of other witnesses. They included Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who testified that he unsuccessfully tried for years to get Apple to switch the default browser on its devices from Google to Microsoft’s Bing. Without being able to do that, he said, even a company as big as Microsoft couldn’t compete.
The Microsoft case was a topic of conversation in the 1990’s, says Northeastern University economics professor John Kwoka. “But that was the last century, so we have a new one: new century, new potential landmark case.”
For the past six weeks, the Justice Department and dozens of top state prosecutors have tried to prove that Google illegally used its monopoly power to ensure its search engine remained on top.
You might not expect an antitrust trial focused on Google’s overwhelming dominance in the year 2023 to spend a lot of time talking about Internet Explorer circa 2005. But you’d be wrong.
In the middle of Monday, Pichai was in the DC courtroom testifying about the US v. GOOGLE antitrust trial. He stood at a podium instead of sitting (apparently he hurt his back), often with a magnifying glass in his hand, pushing his glasses up on his forehead as he squinted down at a binder full of exhibits. One exhibit proved particularly interesting: a letter from Google’s then-top lawyer David Drummond, sent on July 22nd, 2005, to Microsoft’s then-general counsel Brad Smith.
Well, sort of. After 20 minutes of increasingly annoyed back-and-forth between Pichai and US Justice Department lawyer Meagan Bell Shaw, here is what we know about Microsoft and its plan to honor previous versions of IE. It did not change at all, even after hardly anyone knew it existed. This, Drummond argued, was an actively user-hostile thing to do. The default setting for Internet Explorer in the past has not usually been changed to popular search providers that users actually employ, according to him.
Search is a complex product that only gets more complicated over time, according to Pichai. He made the point that search, chrome, and the like are both good products and can make the internet more popular. Pichai said that people use the free mobile operating system to build cheaper phones, and that it has helped bring hundreds of millions of people online.
A few minutes later, Bellshaw brought up Drummond’s letter as more evidence that Google understands the value of defaults. She kept presenting lines that a Google executive wrote 18 years ago that could very well be the words of a DuckDuckGo or Brave employee now. The problem with the default setting is compounded by how changes to it are handled. Most end users don’t change their defaults.
During the trial, the biggest focal point was the amount of money Google spent to be that default, which we now know to have been over twenty billion dollars in just one year. During Schmidtlein’s questioning, Pichai argued that the deals are about more than just money. He said that the rev-share structure was used by Google to encourage the creation of new devices and to maintain them better. (When Judge Amit Mehta asked how that worked, Pichai said Google makes some of its rev-share money dependent on devices getting security updates. For some partners, he said, “more effort goes into developing the next version, and updates are costly… Sometimes they make tradeoffs.
These deals are a good deal because it takes so much money to put them together. They make more people do more Google searches, everybody involved in the deal gets paid, and in such a complex and fast-moving landscape, that’s the only way to compete. A business move is a business move and there is a big difference between one that is legal and one that is illegal. The DOJ, on the other hand, says Google uses its platforms and partners as a wedge to keep out any possible competition. It decried the monster it has become in the past.