On Wednesday, April 30, in Google’s search antitrust trial, CEO Sundar Pichai testified that the United States government’s plan to rectify its illegal search monopoly would 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. If we had to share our IP at marginal cost,” Pichai was quoted as saying by The Verge. He was called as a witness by the company’s own attorneys to testify in the remedies phase of the antitrust trial.
In August last year, a US federal court ruled that Google had an illegal monopoly in the search engine market. Judge Amit Mehta is currently hearing arguments from the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and Google to determine the appropriate remedies and potential damages owed by Google after the landmark antitrust verdict.
The DOJ has proposed to level the playing field by forcing the sale of Google Chrome and requiring the tech giant to share much of its search data and search index with competitors at a “marginal cost”. Google, on the other hand, has asserted that its success in the search market is a result of its investments, further arguing that the proposed remedies would prop up its competitors as they would receive the fruits of its labours.
Notably, Pichai had led the team that created Google Chrome before taking on his current role as CEO. Here are the most telling moments from his testimony in court on Wednesday.
Key highlights
Pichai was the second witness called by Google in its defence. The DOJ also called its own witnesses for questioning last week, which included executives from major AI companies Perplexity and OpenAI.
Out-investing competitors: In response to a question from one of Google’s lead attorneys, Pichai revealed that the company spent a total of $49 billion just last year on Search, AI, and other projects. He argued that no other tech company has “shown a commitment to the level of investment we put in.” “I haven’t seen, since we built Chrome, any other company make the kind of investments,” he said, in response to a question from the DOJ on whether any other company could manage Chrome’s security and privacy as well as Google.
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Selling Chrome: Pichai pointed out that many browsers are built on top of the open-source Chromium project maintained by Google. He said that the company contributes more than 90 per cent of the code to the widely used codebase. He said that he worries about what might become of the Chrome browser in any other hands.
Sharing search data: Pichai said that the government’s proposal requiring Google to give up all the data in its search index to competitors, would be a disaster. It “would allow anyone to completely reverse engineer, end to end, any part of our technology stack,” he said. He also said that the company would not be able to justify continuing to invest so heavily in search if it were required to allow other companies to build exact copies of Google’s search experience.
AI in search: At the World Economic Forum in 2018, Pichai had said that AI could be more profound than fire or electricity. On Wednesday, he said that he believed the theory even more now. On whether AI chatbots could replace search engines, Pichai said while it was not a zero-sum battle between the two products, AI “is going to deeply transform Google Search.”
Gemini deal with Apple: As part of his testimony, Pichai argued that Google should be allowed to continue paying for placement of its Chrome browser as long as the deals were not exclusive. He confirmed that the company was looking to ink a deal with Apple so that its Gemini AI chatbot could be offered as one of the chatbot options in Apple Intelligence. He put the timeline of the deal by “the middle of this year” and the rollout of the Gemini integration in the market soon after.
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