US v. Google: all the news from the search antitrust showdown

A huge part of Google’s defense in US v. Google is that it’s not illegal to build a great product. And to prove that that’s all that’s happening here, Google lawyer John Schmidtlein has spent the last 60 minutes reminding Satya Nadella of Microsoft’s decades of bad decisions about Internet Explorer, Live Search, Windows Phone, and all its other browser and mobile screwups. He even has an internal poll that is headlined: “Our Mobile Story Sucks.”

Nadella is mostly just responding “that sounds right” and “correct.” He’s not arguing that Bing is better than Google — he’s arguing that it’s impossible to be better than Google. And Schmidtlein says no, it’s just that Bing sucks. And that’s your fault, not ours.

One recurring theme in Satya Nadella’s US v. Google testimony is his fear that the AI revolution could make it even harder for upstart search engines to compete. He worries publishers will sign exclusive deals that let Google use their data to train its models — meaning no one else can crawl that data.

“I worry that this vicious cycle I’m trapped in,” Nadella said about a world in which Google can dominate by outspending rivals to prevent anyone else from building a better product, “is only going to get more vicious.”

We’re about 90 minutes into Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s testimony, and his stance so far has been simple: Google’s status as the default search engine has crushed Bing not just as a business, but as a product. Without scale and user data, he said, there’s just no keeping up.

Nadella also said he was prepared to give Apple all of the economic upside of a search deal if it made Bing the default. And he estimated that might cost Microsoft as much as $15 billion a year — but it’d be worth it to make Bing a bigger and more competitive product, he said.

I’m in the building for another day of US v. Google, the big antitrust search trial. On the docket today: Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who I incidentally ran into in the security line. I suspect he’ll be asked a lot of questions about Bing, selling Bing to Apple, Bing AI, “making Google dance,” and more. Word in the hallway is we’re likely to be in open court most of the day, too.

I also just learned who’s up after Nadella: Sridhar Ramaswamy, the former head of ads at Google and the CEO of Neeva, the search engine that says it died at the hands of Google’s monopoly. Gonna be a wild day, friends!

Bloomberg reported yesterday that the “embarrassing” document that Judge Amit Mehta referenced when allowing the DOJ to post documents from the Google Antitrust trial was from a “mock” training session.

In it, Michael Roszak, Google’s VP of finance, reportedly called search ads one of the “greatest business models ever created” and likened it to “illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs).”

The Microsoft CEO’s testimony will follow extensive questions this week about the company’s dealings with Apple and its struggle to get Bing on the iPhone, apparently including floating a sale of the search engine to Apple. And after a week of locked-down testimony, Judge Amit Mehta has directed as much of it as possible to take place in public session.

Google certainly doesn’t seem to think so. In his questioning of Apple’s Eddy Cue this afternoon, Google’s John Schmidtlein took Cue on a journey through Safari history, and Cue said that Safari’s integration of a search box and URL bar was part of what made the browser worked. And that only worked because Google was there — or so the argument goes.

Also, Cue dropped a classic Apple Reality Distortion Field line: “One of the benefits that Google gets from Apple is that we’re telling the world Google is the best search engine, because that’s what customers expect us to pick.”

Apple’s agreement with Google doesn’t allow for that, Apple’s Eddy Cue said in court. And Cue said he doesn’t want to do it anyway: “we try to get people up and running as fast as possible.” But the DOJ is showing exhibits about all the “Ask App Not To Track” screens you see, and the Appearance settings in setup, and more. Their question is: for something as important as search, shouldn’t you let people choose for themselves?

Cue, again, says no. “We pick the best one and let users easily change it,” is his approach. And he says that’s Apple doing right by customers.

We finally got into open court in US v. Google! For the last 45 minutes or so we’ve been listening to Cue talk about the deal he and Sundar Pichai negotiated in 2016 to keep Google as the default search engine on Apple devices. So far, Cue’s stance is simple: Google is the best search engine, so Apple picked it. He says Apple never seriously thought about ditching Google for another provider, or building its own search engine.

The DOJ appears to be walking Cue toward to a privacy question: if you’re so worried about user privacy, shouldn’t you tell people how much Google tracks them and let them opt out? But before we could get there, we took a break. Back at it in a few.

Today’s testimony was set to start at 9:30 this morning. At 9:28, we were told to get out of the courtroom, because this morning was beginning as a closed session. Everything about this trial so far has been unusually, frankly bizarrely , frankly bizasecretive and under wraps — the reporters in the hallway with me are all betting that we’re going to be let in for five minutes at the end of the day, just to hear the plan for tomorrow that we won’t get to see either. Who knows!

I’m writing this from just outside the courtroom in DC, where Apple’s Eddy Cue is set to testify today about Apple’s billion-dollar deal to make Google its default search engine. Bloomberg reports that Cue is planning to say Apple doesn’t need to build its own search, because Google is great — but I suspect the DOJ is going to have lots of questions about that.

This deal is a huge financial win for Apple, and a crucial way for Google to maintain its market share. Today’s testimony could be a bellwether for much of what’s to come.

It is frankly shameful that Judge Amit Mehta still hasn’t ruled on opening up access to documents in this industry-shaking trial, let alone made it clear when any of the trial itself would be open to the public. Today, Apple’s John Giannandrea testified in closed court while reporters waited outside with no communication from the court at all. Ridiculous.

Google says it’s more likely than you think! The company is still fighting with the DOJ over whether to admit a potentially “embarrassing” document into evidence — the one that led to public records of the trial getting pulled off the internet. Mehta says he’ll rule on admitting the document tomorrow.

And that’s right, it sounds like we also still don’t know if the Justice Department will be allowed to resume posting exhibits online. But we got some testimony from DuckDuckGo’s CEO on the company’s travails competing with Google.

It’s the end of a locked-down day in US v. Google, culminating in some discussion of a yet-unviewed document at the center of a dispute between the two parties. And apparently we still don’t know if the Justice Department will be allowed to post exhibits from the trial (which, let’s reiterate, are public records) online. Frustrating!

Per Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen, there’s been “no word” on whether the Justice Department can keep posting exhibits online as they’re introduced in court.

Here’s the list of expected witnesses for the day as week two for this trial between the DOJ and Google kicks off, starting at 9:30AM ET:

• Verizon executive Brian Higgins, who will likely be questioned about Google’s exclusivity deals on Android. (This may take place in a closed court session.)

• Google vice president and general manager of ads Jerry Dischler. Dischler has worked at Google since 2005, so there’s a lot of history to go over.

• Former Google financial analyst John Yoo. Yoo’s LinkedIn bio describes his work as “research and analytics to structure and scale some of Google’s largest commercial deals meant to drive distribution and usage of Google’s services” on Android, among other tasks. He joined the company in 2016 and left in March of 2023.