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On Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was grilled by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) over an antitrust case alleging that the company abused its power to stifle competition in the online search market. As expected, he painted Google in a good light, saying that it is only doing business. It has no intention to harm others. As part of his testimony, the CEO went back to the Internet Explorer era and said the industry has operated this way for decades.
Sundar Pichai talked about Internet Explorer during the DOJ testimony
The DOJ has accused Google of strangling rivals in the search industry by unfair means. The Justice Department has questioned the company’s tactics such as defaulting its search engines on its products and paying other device manufacturers to do the same. Most notably, Google pays Apple a whopping $18 billion every year to make its search engine default on the Safari browser for iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
Sundar Pichai contested this argument by saying that prioritizing one’s own products isn’t a new practice in the industry. To prove his point, the Google CEO showed a letter from July 22, 2005. Google’s then-top lawyer David Drummond had sent the letter to Microsoft’s then-general counsel Brad Smith showing concern over the launch of Internet Explorer 7, which debuted in beta five days later.
Drummond’s concern was about the browser’s default search engine. The search bar that appeared next to the URL bar defaulted users to MSN. Microsoft did plan to “honor” the default search engine setting from previous versions of IE. However, according to Drummond, those settings were buried under the system menus. Not many people knew about the feature and fewer used it to change their default search engine.
The Google lawyer added that Microsoft should offer IE7 users a choice screen where they can easily pick the default. “Google believes that the search market should remain competitive,” he said. Microsoft didn’t do that. Sundar Pichai pointed out this to show the DOJ that companies have been self-prioritizing for decades. The practice has only gotten more ruthless in recent years.
Pichai says Google’s deal with Apple is nothing more than business
As expected, Pichai had to answer many questions about Google’s deal with Apple. He said that the company spends lavishly on these deals because “they’re a good deal.” According to the Google CEO, the deals ensure that “more people do more Google searches” and “everybody involved in the deal gets paid.”
“In such a complex and fast-moving landscape, that’s the only way to compete,” Pichai added (via The Verge). “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 Google CEO followed Prabhakar Raghavan, its senior vice president responsible for search and ads, to the hot seat. The DOJ will hear the company’s defense for a few more weeks. The court may not announce its ruling until next year.