Microsoft CEO testifies against Google in antitrust trial

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct valuation for Microsoft.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified Monday in the Department of Justice’s antitrust trial against Google as the government’s push to prove Google maintains an illegal monopoly in online search. 

In testimony before a packed courtroom, Nadella said Google has made it difficult for Microsoft — a company valued at $2.4 trillion — to compete in the search engine market, according to multiple reports.  

Nadella said Google’s deals to be the default search engine across web browsers was a key limiting factor to competition from other tech companies. He also argued that Google will be able to use its size to dominate the emerging artificial intelligence (AI) space, according to reports of his Monday testimony. 

Microsoft and Google have been locked in an AI arms race. Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI and incorporated the popular ChatGPT tools into Microsoft products,

“Despite my enthusiasm that there is a new angle with AI, I worry a lot that this vicious cycle that I’m trapped in could get even more vicious,” Nadella said, according to The New York Times. 

Nadella said that as publishers and platforms become more aware of how their data is used to train AI systems, they may start to sign exclusive deals that would allow only Google to use their data, The Verge reported.

“What is publicly available today, will it be publicly available tomorrow?” Nadella asked, according to the Verge. “That’s the issue.”

Adam Severt, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, asked Nadella about Google’s billion-dollar deal to be the exclusive search provider on Apple devices. 

The government has focused on Google’s deals with Apple and other companies to be their default search engine — especially on mobile devices — as it attempts to prove Google maintains an illegal monopoly in the search market. 

Severt asked Nadella what it would mean if Microsoft were to have the same deal with Apple, The Verge reported. 

“It would be a game-changer,” Nadella reportedly said. 

Google has pushed back strongly on the government’s allegations that it maintains an illegal monopoly. Google argues that those deals are not anti-competitive and that users can easily change to a different search engine. 

But Nadella reportedly called that argument “bogus,” since users rarely change their default search engine. 

“You get up in the morning, you brush [your] teeth and you search on Google,” Nadella testified, according to the Times. 

In questioning Nadella, Google’s lead counsel John Schmidtlein argued that Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, was not inferior because of anticompetitive behavior from Google, but rather because of mismanagement from Microsoft, The Verge reported. 

Schmidtlein argued that Google out-invested and out-executed Microsoft to become the more popular search engine, according to The Verge. 

After the DOJ and states attorneys general make their cases against Google, the tech giant will have a chance to present its defense. The trial is expected to last 10 weeks.