Google’s search antitrust case against artificial intelligence: A keynote address at the DoJ’s High-Relevance Arbitrary Semantics Trial

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, took the stand on Wednesday during the remedies phase of the company’s search antitrust trial, and offered a simple message. He said the plan to change the way that search is conducted would be so bad that it would be hard to continue to build a search engine.

Pichai called this a “dynamic moment” when a number of newly developed chatbots are reaching tens of thousands of users each day. Pichai said Google views its AI chatbot, Gemini, as a leading model in the industry, but still a “big gap” remains between them and what he views as the market leader: OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Pichai said that he believes that search will be disrupted by artificial intelligence in a few years. The way that it will evolve will be very profound according to Pichai.

He said that the company integrates artificial intelligence into many products, but first made it into the search engine, where it helped improve the quality of search.

“AI is one of the most profound technologies humans will ever use,” Pichai said. He said that in order to stay competitive, companies have to spend a lot on research and development in the field of artificial intelligence.

The theme of his testimony was of little surprise, as the tech giant has long argued that the DOJ’s proposed remedies are both dangerous and “unprecedented” and would hurt American consumers, the economy and tech innovation. It focused on how Google views the development of AI and how it is innovating the technology.

The case was concluded on Tuesday by the Justice Department, as well as giving evidence and calling witnesses to testify, which will include more executives from both Apple and Google. Google maintains that it will appeal Mehta’s underlying ruling once the penalty phase of the trial is over.

One consistent point of questioning from the DOJ has been whether Google is the only company that can take care of its users’ experience and privacy. It is a tactic to forceGoogle to say no over and over again. The DOJ asked whether another company could manage privacy and security of chrome, which led to a fight between Pihai and Veronica Onyema. He cited “a cultural commitment” to Chrome and the web, and said that “I haven’t seen, since we built Chrome, any other company make the kind of investments” Google has. He wasn’t sure who would buy Chrome, but he worried about what would happen to the world’s most popular browser.

The Justice Department had taken aim at the search engine company’s contracts with device makers such as Apple when they filed their original case in 2020. The DOJ wanted Mehta to rule that this discriminated against competitors and that the only way to get rid of it would be to stop paying for it.

Pichai’s testimony also touched on many of the case’s other important remedy proposals, including the government’s desire to force Google to sell Chrome. OpenAI, Perplexity, Yahoo, and others are all interested in the proposal. Before he was Google’s CEO, Pichai led the team that created Chrome in the first place, and he argued that there’s simply no other company in tech that will care for the browser — and the internet — the way Google will.

The data-sharing proposal would be a disaster, said Pichai. He called it “far-reaching” and “extraordinary,” appearing on the stand practically flummoxed by the very idea of the proposal. He thinks that it would be a great idea to require that all data in the search index and the ways in which it is ranked be given up.

They can use databases like these to train large language models, so that they can engage in conversations and generate human-like responses.

Google hasn’t ceased to pay for search placement, but it is doing so now, and that’s all Google will have to do

Google spent over a billion dollars on Chrome in just the last year, Pichai said, and tens of billions in the last decade. He noted that many other browsers run on the open-source Chromium infrastructure, and that Google is responsible for most of its code commits. Other companies can build browsers but they haven’t showed their commitment to the level of investment we put in.

The deals Google makes for search placement have been a key factor in this trial, and of course Google’s relationship with Apple came up as well. Pichai argued that Google should be allowed to continue paying for placement, as long as its deals are not exclusive. Google has already begun changing its deals to that effect, including with Apple: Onyema asked Pichai if he wanted to confirm that a deal was in the works for a product that would be available shortly after, as well as if he wanted to state that it was something that would be available at the middle of this year. This would be a multi-provider deal that was not allowed by the previous owner of the company.

The DOJ says, well, yes — that’s the only way to level the playing field. Pichai’s obvious goal was to convince Mehta that the proposed changes wouldn’t just prop up competitors, but would also make it impossible for Google to continue being an innovative company. “It’s not clear to me how we’d have any value for our IP,” he said, “if we had to share our IP at marginal cost.”