Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai testified in the U.S. government's antitrust trial against the company on Monday.
For the last month and a half of the trial, the government has been working to make its case that Google's actions violate antitrust law through illegal monopoly maintenance. The lack of competition in general search tools, the government argues, deprives consumers of improved quality and choice. Google expressed concern at the time that the setting to change the search engine on IE was hidden. Pichai testified that to his knowledge, "not a single user" used the IE setting in the earlier version of the browser to change the search engine from Microsoft's.
Google had "proposed instead that users be prompted to select the default search provider the first time they use the inline search feature," Drummond wrote in the 2005 letter. Pichai testified that Google does not prohibit choice screens, but conceded that for phone manufacturers who agree to the revenue sharing agreement , providing a choice screen for the search engine would not be consistent with the agreement. He said that when doing a commercial deal like the RSA, "we are paying for enhanced promotion." He added that phone manufacturers "have the option not to take the RSA.
In notes from a 2018 meeting that included Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook, a Google executive recounted that Google expressed, "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company." Pichai testified that he did not recall saying that line. He added that coming out of that meeting, during which Apple wanted to discuss concerns about revenue growth deceleration on Safari under their existing deal, "there was some what I would call irrational exuberance.
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