October 31, 2023: Google CEO Sundai Pichai takes the stand, for long-awaited testimony about the relationship between his company and Apple. He gave some details about Google’s negotiations with Apple over a contract that made Google the default search engine on Apple’s iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Google has paid billions for the privilege of being the default search on Apple products, and the relationship is a key part of the case – which was underlined by the Justice Department’s cross-examination of Pichai, during which he admitted that default search status is a major driver of market share.
October 18, 2023: Google begins its defense, calling Paul Nayak, a vice president of search, to the stand as its first witness. Nayak downplays the importance of scale in his testimony, stressing that machine intelligence, compute infrastructure, and a team of 16,000 staff that checks on search results are crucial to maintaining quality of service. DOJ witnesses including DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had testified that Google keeps an edge over competitors via an ever-increasing trove of data — the result of its default search engine status, maintained through exclusive contracts and billions of dollars in payments to Apple, Samsung and other companies. This data gives Google an advantage in refining search engine results, they said.
October 3, 2023: As a witness for the prosecution in the Google antitrust trial, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns that Google’s monopoly profits could lock in publishers as AI-enabled search arrives. Nadella argued that it’s almost impossible to compete with Google, given the search leader’s massive competitive edge in collecting and analyzing user data. He also warned that Google, with its vast profits and lock on the search market, stands poised to extend its monopoly power in a new era where artificial intelligence technologies will turbocharge the search business.
