Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stand Monday to defend the search giant in the largest tech antitrust trial since the Microsoft case of the 1990s, marking a climactic moment in the US government’s weeks-long effort to prove that Google has illegally monopolized the online search market.
Pichai, whom Google called as a star witness, opened his testimony by recounting his journey from Chennai, India to Google and his path to becoming the tech company’s CEO in 2015.
Standing at a podium in a dark suit, crisp white shirt and gray tie, Pichai described how Google’s investments in Chrome, its proprietary web browser, accelerated users’ experiences with popular websites and led them to conduct more Google searches.
The history lesson is central to Google’s defense that the company’s search dominance owes to people preferring Google because it is the best, not because it behaved illegally to gain and preserve a monopoly.
By making Google’s search engine a seamless part of the Chrome browser, and by offering users a minimalist design that created more room for search results and web content within a browser window, Google believed it would drive more search usage, Pichai testified.
“The correlation was pretty clear to see,” Pichai said, before Google attorney John Schmidtlein presented an internal email from 2010 showing research that users who switched from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer performed 48% more Google searches. Users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser that switched to Chrome performed 27% more searches on Google, the email said.
Pichai’s testimony represents Google’s attempt to rebut claims by rivals including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who testified last month that Google has thwarted competition in search and risks dominating the artificial intelligence sector by training its large language models on search query data that it controls.
The US government case against Google focuses on the company’s web of contracts that make its search engine the default on millions of devices and browsers around the globe. Google has paid Apple more than an estimated $10 billion a year to be the default on Apple devices and software. In 2021, Google paid $26.3 billion to secure default agreements with its partners worldwide, according to a slide introduced in the trial last week.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
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