The Google Challenge in a Bench Trial: John Schmidtlein, CEO, and Mr. Mehta’s Explanation for the Google Email Campaign

If Google prevails, the company will likely be able to continue its same business dealings for the time being. If Judge Mehta rules in favor of the Justice Department, it’s still unclear how he’d sanction Google. It may be fines as well as ending exclusive agreements to company restructuring.

Along with Pichai, Google is planning to call at least 10 other witnesses. The trial is expected to last until the end of November. The trial is a bench trial, so there’s no jury and the presiding judge will give a final ruling.

Google controls around 90% of the U.S. search engine market. The company is expected to say that it’s not necessary for people to use its search because it’s the default browser. People don’t have to change browsers with only a few taps, but they choose to remain.

When asked about these emails in court, Pichai said he was simply trying to find ways for everyone to get what they wanted. “We said one of the things that works well on Android, which drives increased usage, is a Google Search application. So I proposed that we could build a Google search application for iOS… and we would be committed to supporting the product for many years.”

When he first joined the company in 2004, his job involved working on the Google search toolbar. He later led the team that built the company’s chrome browser, which was heavily reliant on GOOGLE search.

Last Thursday, a few days after it began, the search engine started hitting on the idea of its defense over the next three weeks. And there are few people more qualified to talk about its search products than CEO Sundar Pichai.

“Microsoft has failed to invest, failed to innovate in a manner comparable to Google, in many areas that have nothing to do with scale,” Schmidtlein said.

Throughout the course of the trial Google has brushed aside claims that its exclusive agreements with device manufacturers are what gives its business a leg up. Rather, the company claims, it’s the quality of its products. John Schmidtlein, lead lawyer for Google, said that search engines like Bing don’t measure up.

The pervasive nature of it made the New York Times and other news organizations file a court motion asking the judge to conduct the case in an open courtroom.

Some information in the court came out, but a lot of the information was given in private. More than half of the testimony was closed to the public. As the trail proceeded, the company continued to push for the suppression of documents and proceedings in public court.

DuckDuckGo and Neeva executives testified that their potential to gain market share was quashed by the exclusive deals offered by the tech giant.

“Everybody talks about the open web, but there is really the Google web,” Nadella said during his testimony. The distribution advantage will always be there, no matter what.

The Justice Department called dozens of other witnesses. The CEO of Microsoft testified that he tried for years to get Apple to switch their default browser to Microsoft’s Bing. Without being able to do that, he said, even a company as big as Microsoft couldn’t compete.

“The Microsoft case was, at the time, talked about as the case of the century,” said John Kwoka, a Northeastern University economics professor who researches antitrust. The last century was not the new century, so there is a new potential landmark case.

In the past six weeks, the Justice Department and dozens of state prosecutors have worked together to try and prove that Google was in violation of antitrust laws.

In 2018, Pichai said in testimony, Apple was concerned about a decline in revenue growth from their rev-share deal. Executives complained that revenue from the partnership was not growing as fast as revenue from the partnership. Something might be causing the discrepancy, according to the responses from GOOGLE. The newish Apple product called ‘Siri Suggestions’ was on the list to help users get where they were going faster for some queries. According to notes shared by the partnerships executive Don Harrison, Apple is in charge of the amount or type of traffic received by the browser that it uses.

Pichai had made his case that day. Harrison stated that Pihai talked about people trusting us to get this right and trusting us with the content of what they were searching for when it came to building an app. Tim listened but did not react to this specifically other than noting we had different strengths.”

Pichai’s testimony covered a lot of ground, from his concept of attorney-client privilege to Google’s feisty legal reaction to Internet Explorer 7’s launch in 2005. But it was the Apple deal, as always in this case, that seemed to linger over everything.