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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from [email protected]
Microsoft’s Nadella to Testify at Google Antitrust Trial Monday
By Leah Nylen and Dina Bass
October 1, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. EDT
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella is set to take the stand Monday as part of the Justice Department’s antitrust trial against Google.
The DOJ has accused Alphabet Inc.’s search division of unlawfully maintaining a monopoly by paying $10 billion a year to rivals, smartphone manufacturers and wireless carriers to make its search engine the default option on mobile devices and web browsers. Google has denied the allegations.
To help prove its case, the DOJ hopes to use testimony from Nadella and other executives from Microsoft to show how even a company of its size and resources couldn’t unlock Google’s hold on the search market.
Last week, Microsoft business development executive Jonathan Tinter testified that the Redmond, Washington-based software giant failed to secure a deal to put its Bing search app on Apple’s products, even though it was willing to offer far better terms than Google and lose multiple billions of dollars on the agreement. In the end, Apple signed a fresh deal with Google.
Tinter also told the court that Microsoft’s Surface Duo smartphone was required to use Google search in order to license the Android mobile operating system and was limited from using Bing on its own devices. Nadella was personally involved in discussing some of these issues with his Google counterpart, Sundar Pichai, and will probably be asked about those conversations.
Nadella was instrumental in the development of Bing, created by Microsoft in an ultimately doomed attempt to catch up with Google and capture a chunk of the online advertising market.
While Bing has gained share on desktop computers, where it was integrated with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and later Edge browser, it has lagged on mobile devices where people overwhelming use Google. Three or so years ago, Microsoft even discussed selling Bing to Apple, a transaction that would have replaced Google as the default option on the iPhone maker’s devices, Bloomberg reported. But a deal never came to fruition.
I doubt a a court would care about a browser engine monopoly. They’re more concerned with markets and money, not with technical implementation details or open standards. Besides, even if that were to happen, google can point to Safari which is a different implementation with a very large market share.
Safari is locked behind Apple devices so it’s irrelevant outside that particular garden. The most they could use the Safari argument for is to say Google doesn’t have a monopoly on Apple devices.
Firefox and the fact they support it is their only argument for Android and PC. They’ll want to preserve it carefully. They have nothing to gain by squashing Firefox (its market share is already as low as it can go without becoming irrelevant) and everything to lose (it would feed right into ongoing antitrust investigations in EU and US and probably open new ones).
In the US, it seems that courts do not care about “on Apple devices”. They see two markets: mobile devices, and laptops/desktops. Blink based browsers make up a minority in the US on mobile devices due to the dominance of Apple, and while they do have the majority on desktops/laptops, Safari is still double digits and Firefox has a small slice of the pie as well. Even if that was enough, there would still need to be evidence that this is due to anti-competitive measures and not true user preference. This will be hard because Microsoft isn’t publicly being compensated for choosing Blink for edge, nor does google have any wide-scale measures to coerce users onto chrome other than marketing in their own products and services.
You reckon the DoJ may have started the trial without the necessary evidence?
The current trial is about google’s monopoly on search, not browser engines.