Google CEO: Payments for default search aided users
WASHINGTON — As Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells it, his company has always been on the side of consumers. It has paid billions to other industry giants, including Apple and Samsung, he said, to make sure Google’s internet search engine worked as well as it should on those companies’ devices.
Testifying on Monday in Google’s landmark antitrust trial, Pichai directly contradicted the Justice Department’s claims that his company’s huge payments to companies such as Apple to be the default internet search option on their popular devices represent its unchecked monopoly power. Pichai said he had been worried that Apple, in particular, would make it more difficult to use Google’s search on its devices, and he believed Google had to pay to make sure that wouldn’t happen.
“Given that Apple designs the experience, it wasn’t clear how they would change the experience if the financial incentive wasn’t there,” Pichai said while testifying for more than three hours.
Pichai was the highest profile witness to testify so far in the 10-week trial. The monopoly trial — the first involving a tech giant of the modern internet era — reflects increasing efforts in Washington to rein in the power of Big Tech.
Google paid $26.3 billion for its search engine to be the default selection on mobile and desktop browsers in 2021, according to Google’s internal data presented during the trial. A majority of that, about $18 billion, went to Apple, The New York Times has reported.
Google’s competitors testified earlier in the trial that the payments effectively made it impossible for them to compete.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the search giant’s power was so significant that the internet was really the “Google web” and that its relationship with Apple was “oligopolistic.”