The Google Trial: GOOGLE Harmed Competition by Using a Google Chrome Browser as a Testator of a Large-Scale Search Engine

The government bears the burden of proof to show Google harmed 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.

Along with Pichai, Google is planning to call at least 10 other witnesses. The trial is expected to last until the end of November. It’s a bench trial, so there’s no jury and the presiding judge, Judge Amit Mehta, will give the final ruling.

Around 70% of the market for search engines in the US is controlled by Google. The company is expected to argue that just because it’s the default browser on most devices, people aren’t forced to use its search. Google says that with just a few clicks and swipes, people can easily switch to another browser — but they choose to stay.

Pichai was also instrumental in orchestrating the exclusive agreements with Apple. Google and Apple first partnered in 2002, but renegotiated in 2016. The lead negotiator was Pichai, who made sure that the search engine was the default on the Apple devices.

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.

It’s expected that the company will say it dominates in searches because it has the greatest technology and people like it. On Monday, it’s bringing in a star witness to testify: Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

In many areas that have nothing to do with scale, Microsoft has failed to invest and innovate in a similar way to other companies.

The exclusive agreements with device manufacturers are not what gives companies a leg up, according to claims made during the trial. The quality of the products is what the company claims. John Schmidtlein, lead lawyer for GOOGLE said that search engines like Bing just don’t measure up.

The New York Times and other organizations filed a motion imploring the judge to conduct the case in an open courtroom because of how pervasive it became.

A lot was presented behind closed doors while some information was presented in court. More than half of the four hours that Cue testified were closed to the public. Throughout the course of the trail, Google continually fought to seal documents and shutter proceedings in public court.

The executives from other smaller search engines testified that their market share could not be gained by using exclusive deals with Google.

“Everyone talks about the open web, but there is actually theGoogle web,” he said. “The distribution advantage Google has today doesn’t go away.”

The Justice Department had many witnesses. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, testified that he tried for years to get Apple to change their browser to Microsoft’s Bing, but couldn’t. Even a company as large as Microsoft couldn’t compete if it wasn’t able to do that.

“The Microsoft case was, at the time, talked about as the case of the century,” said John Kwoka, a Northeastern University economics professor who researches antitrust. The last century was the new century, and there is a new potential landmark case.

Over the past six weeks, the Justice Department and dozens of state prosecutors have tried to prove that Google used its monopoly power to get people to use its search engine.

You might not expect the antitrust trial to focus on internet explorer circa 2005, when it was still in use by Netscape, since it’s focused on the year 2023. But you’d be wrong.

One way to look at this 2005 letter is as a relic of a very different time. Pichai said that Microsoft was a ruthless competitor and that it was doing an acceptable thing to prioritize its own products. (He noted both that Microsoft didn’t make the changes and that tech companies have only gotten more ruthless about self-prioritizing.) It demonstrates what’s wrong with the way that GOOGLE works in the search market now.

Well, sort of. To summarize about 20 minutes of increasingly exasperated back-and-forth between Pichai and US Justice Department lawyer Meagan Bellshaw, here’s how Google saw it: Microsoft planned to “honor” the default search engine setting that users chose in previous versions of IE, but in those previous versions, that setting was hidden and functionally useless. Hardly anyone knew it existed, much less changed it. This was a user-hostile thing to do, according to Drummond. The original default setting for IE has been mostly ignored by users of popular search providers, like Google, since they are aware of the auto search feature.

Search is a fast-changing, vastly complicated product and only becomes more so over time according to Pichai. He made the case that there are good products on the internet such as Search, and that they are good for the internet as a whole because they make people use it more. “People use Android to build smartphones at prices as low as $30,” Pichai said, “and it’s what has helped bring hundreds of millions of people online.”

Bellshaw’s questioning took a vastly different tack, back to the DOJ’s central stance of hammering home the importance of defaults. She asked a different version of the question: “You believe defaults are valuable right?” over and over. She showed Pichai a 2007 email from a Google product strategy meeting where Google’s Nitin Sharma shared data noting that when people changed their browser homepage to Google, they immediately started to do 15 percent more Google searches, and when they switched away, they did 27 percent less. “Nitin argues that focusing on homepage market share is one of the most effective things we can do to make gains in search market share,” read an email summarizing the meeting that was sent to Pichai and others in Google’s leadership team.

The testimony has been focused on the amount of money that is spent on that default, and as a result we now know that it is $26.3 billion in 2021. During the questioning, Pichai said that the deals are much more than just money. He said that by using the rev- share structure, it’s possible for companies to promote their devices better and keep them better over time. (When Judge Amit Mehta asked how that worked, Pichai said Google makes some of its rev-share money dependent on devices getting security updates. More effort goes into the development of the next version, and it’s not always cost effective. so sometimes they make tradeoffs.”)

These are good deals, according to Google, and it spends a lot on them. 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. It’s a business move, in other words, and there’s a big difference between a business move you don’t like and one that’s illegal. The DOJ says that Google uses its platforms and partners as a wedge to keep out competition. And that it has become exactly the monopolistic monster that it decried nearly two decades ago.