“I’m not aware of us soliciting bids,” Verizon’s Brian Higgins said Monday during an antitrust trial in Washington to determine if Alphabet Inc.’s Google maintains a monopoly in the online search business. He didn’t say why Verizon failed to seek competing offers.
The antitrust trial before US District Judge Amit Mehta began last week and is expected to last into November. If the judge rules at the end of the trial that Google violated the law, he might seek a second proceeding to consider options for remedy, including breaking up the company. Verizon, the largest US carrier, signed with Microsoft in 2010 to make Bing as the default search engine on Android smartphones sold in the US. For example, the Samsung Fascinate — one of the first in Samsung’s popular Galaxy S line — featured Bing, not Google, according to John Schmidtlein, a lawyer for Google.
Higgins, who served as Verizon’s senior vice president of device and consumer product marketing, said Monday the agreement was renegotiated again during his time with the telecom giant. He said he wasn’t aware of negative reviews in 2010 related to Verizon’s choice of Bing on the phone.