Two weeks ago, Google celebrated a big day in Washington. President Biden signs an executive order creating safeguards for artificial intelligence that could impact Google’s most pressing projects, and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announces support for Ukrainian refugees and women’s economic security. The award was given to the company in recognition of its achievements in promoting this.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai took to the witness stand in a federal court about two miles from the White House to defend his company against claims that it had outcompeted rivals in the search and online advertising markets. I spent most of the day there.
On Tuesday, Pichai countered the video game company’s claims that Epic Games is violating the law and exercising monopoly power over app developers on Android’s Google Play Store. To do so, he testified again, this time in San Francisco.
Over the past month, Mr. Pichai has become the face of the two countries’ battle in Google’s antitrust court. And his visit to the witness stand underscores the growing importance for Big Tech leaders to be sharp witnesses for their companies, whether in antitrust trials or hearings on Capitol Hill. .
The sworn testimony is a task that may be required of many tech company chief executives in the coming years, with Amazon, Meta and others facing their own antitrust court battles. This is not a job that many executives are good at.
Although he was never called to the witness stand to testify, Bill, the former Microsoft CEO, was involved in the last major technology antitrust case brought by the Justice Department more than 20 years ago. Gates appeared combative and evasive in his deposition.
In recent years, executives like Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman (and, of course, Pichai) have been called upon to testify before Congress for a variety of reasons, with varying degrees of success. While Mr. Zuckerberg has sometimes infuriated lawmakers with vague answers, Mr. Altman appeared to win over senators during this year’s hearings.
A modest, detail-oriented executive, Mr. Pichai’s main mission on the witness stand was to keep his cool during cross-examinations and emphasize the central point of Google’s antitrust defense: that Google is an innovative company. It was to protect. It maintained its leadership through innovation and hard work, not through illegal monopolization.
On Tuesday, Pichai faced intense questioning from Epic’s attorney Lauren Moskowitz, who asked him to answer yes or no.
It led to at least one small reveal. Pichai acknowledged that his company gave Apple 36 percent of the search revenue it generated on the iPhone, saying the total payout last year was “well over $10 billion.” Moskowitz claimed the amount was at least $18 billion.
Lawyers for Google and Apple argued Tuesday morning to suppress the numbers, emphasizing the need for corporate privacy that has survived both Google trials. Judge James Donato rejected their request, saying, “Just coming in and saying we have a sensitive issue with this is not going to work.”
Moskowitz was trying to refute Google’s argument that it cannot be considered a monopoly because of its rivalry with Apple. If that’s the case, she argued, why is Apple being given preferential treatment over other companies like Samsung, which receives 16 percent of the search revenue from its devices?
“We are in intense competition with Apple at the operating system, smartphone and app store levels,” Pichai later said under questioning from Google’s lawyers. “This competition has been good for consumers and developers.”
The Justice Department filed a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google in October 2020, alleging that the company’s default search agreements with cell phone makers and browser companies help maintain an illegal monopoly.
Google called Pichai, 51, to the stand two weeks ago. Rather than sit in the witness box, Pichai stood at the podium with a microphone on for nearly four hours, as if he were giving a speech at a corporate conference. His handler said he had to stand due to a lower back sprain.
He talks about his background, getting a phone as a teenager in Chennai, India, and understanding the power of technology at the time, then goes on to talk about his company’s competitiveness, its relationship with Apple, and how the government is illegal. deftly answered a question about the default search agreement that he claims. .
Pichai sought to refute claims by government lawyers that Google pays billions of dollars a year to keep Apple out of the search market. He presented a different story, saying his company wanted to be the default search engine on iPhones because its “value” was important and Apple needed to make sure the user experience was protected.
“Since 2016, we felt like this deal was going well,” Pichai said. “Search usage and search revenue continued to grow.”
During cross-examination, Pichai reiterated the basis for the agreement so many times that he appeared momentarily unable to bear the cross-examination, saying he had “just given all the reasons” for the agreement.
Adam Kovacevic, a tech industry lobbyist with the Chamber for Progress who worked at Google for 12 years, said Pichai’s testimony gave the court a broader view of how the company made strategic decisions. Stated.
“He did well,” Kovacevic said of Pichai’s performance. “The biggest thing for me is that when you’re in a position like that, your first goal is not to become Bill Gates in the Microsoft trial. Your first goal is to be responsive, reasonable, That seems to be the case.”
Excerpts from Gates’ combative videotaped testimony were shown in court more than 20 years ago. Antitrust lawyers say the Microsoft co-founder has undermined the credibility of him and his company with the judge in the case.
In San Francisco, Mr. Pichai accused Facebook and Amazon of Google when he had a smartphone because they mistakenly marked emails as subject to attorney-client privilege (to prevent them from being forwarded). Questions were asked about a wide range of topics, ranging from whether it was able to compete with the Play Store. ambition.
“There are nuances to these questions,” Moskowitz said with a smile as he began speaking. “I’m trying to answer your question.”
Judge Donato repeatedly asked Moskowitz to “remain quiet” to allow Pichai to speak.
There is one major difference between these lawsuits. That is, there are no juries in antitrust trials in Washington. The decision will be made by a judge. In San Francisco, Mr. Pichai had to appeal to a nine-person jury that was likely to accept the idea that big tech companies were exploiting much smaller companies. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is also expected to testify at trial.
Google and Epic declined to comment.
Epic, the maker of the hit game Fortnite, filed a lawsuit against Google in 2020 to avoid the 15 to 30 percent fees on subscriptions and in-app purchases it would have to pay to Google. .
The game developer antagonized Google and Apple by directing users to pay for in-app transactions directly through Epic. In response, Google and Apple suspended Fortnite from their app stores. Epic claims that Google bullied other companies into canceling their contracts with Epic before being banned from the app store.
Google is facing a new antitrust lawsuit by the Justice Department, accusing it of illegally abusing its monopoly over technology to serve online ads.
A trial in the case could begin as early as next year, but it is too early to know whether Mr. Pichai will be called to testify.
Mr. Pichai has tried to keep Google employees distracted from the lawsuit. He encouraged his employees to “keep doing what they’re doing” and assigned a relatively small number of employees (a few hundred out of more than 180,000) to work on the Justice Department’s cases.
But Pichai’s court appearance has taken time away from other responsibilities as a company leader, including plans to restore Google’s dominance in the burgeoning field of generative AI.
During Mr. Pichai’s October testimony, Secretary of State Blinken praised the work of Google’s Polish subsidiary in promoting economic security for women and assisting Ukrainian refugees. Hours later, Mr. Biden hosted a signing ceremony at the White House, but Mr. Pichai’s representatives were unable to say “yes” because he might still have been on the court when it began.
“That’s not the best use of his time,” Richard Kramer, an analyst at Arete Research, a London-based investment research firm, said in an interview. He said, “No CEO wants to spend his time getting blamed by government lawyers.”