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.on their popular devices represent its unchecked monopoly power.
The US Federal Trade Commission has filed its own antitrust lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta, arguing it stifled nascent competitors, and Amazon, which it says squeezes small merchants and favours its own services. On Monday,laying out the government’s first rules for the artificial intelligence systems that Silicon Valley companies have raced to build.
Google paid $US26.3 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 $US18 billion, went to Apple,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.”Pichai, who is also CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told a different story.
He said that in negotiations with Apple to be the default search engine on its devices, he was told by Eddy Cue, an Apple executive, that the deal was “very competitive.” He said Cue acknowledged there was “tension” in the relationship between the two companies because Apple’s revenue share from the deal, which was proportional to the traffic it sends to Google, had fallen.