The 52-year-old Sundar Pichai began his career at Google in 2004 as a product manager and worked his way up to become the company’s CEO in 2015.
A Justice Department proposal to share search data with competitors would be a “de facto” divestment of Alphabet Inc.’s search engine, CEO Sundar Pichai told a court that determined that Google illegally controls internet search.
According to Pichai’s testimony on Wednesday, competitors could reverse engineer “every aspect of our technology” if Google were forced to disclose both its search data and the details on how it ranks results.
“The data sharing proposal is so comprehensive and so remarkable,” Pichai remarked. According to him, it “feels like de facto divestiture of search” and all of its technology and intellectual property after 25 years of development.
The government wants Google to divest its Chrome browser, license some search data to competitors, and cease paying for monopoly positions on other apps and gadgets. Additionally, it has requested that Mehta broaden the ban to include Google’s AI assistant Gemini and other products, which the government claims were made possible by the company’s unlawful search monopoly.
Google has responded that the government’s plan will harm the American economy and consumers while undermining the country’s position as a leader in technology.
With Google’s protracted antitrust cases making their way through the courts, Pichai is testifying for the third time in as many years. After just two weeks in late 2023, the tech executive had to move from Mehta’s Washington courtroom, where he was defending Google in the initial stages of the Justice Department’s search monopoly case, to a San Francisco courtroom, where a judge heard claims made by Fortnite developer Epic Games Inc. that Google Play had unlawfully continued to dominate the mobile-app market.
Google was found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior in each of those cases, as well as one in which Pichai chose not to appear, pertaining to the company’s domination of online advertising technology industries. This demonstrates how the internet business has been under extraordinary antitrust scrutiny in the US in recent years due to its ability to control important areas of the online world.
Pichai, 52, has worked with Google for much of his career. He began as a product manager in 2004 and worked his way up to become CEO in 2015. He has served in a number of capacities, including contributing significantly to the creation of Chrome and assisting in the engineering of the business’ Android strategy.
Pichai wore a dark suit and chose to stand rather than sit throughout his testimony, much as he had done on his first appearance in federal court for the first round of the Justice Department’s search monopoly case. He served as Google’s second witness after the company’s attorneys summoned in cybersecurity specialist Heather Adkins, a Google employee, on Tuesday afternoon. Adkins testified that Google was a good steward of Chrome because of its dedication to security, outlining the steps the firm took to stop malicious attacks on the browser by bad actors.
Mehta has stated that he hopes to make a decision by August regarding how to repair the damage brought about by Google’s hegemony. However, he will probably have to wait years for any reforms to be implemented at Google. The business is anticipated to file an appeal and maybe push the matter all the way to the US Supreme Court following the remedial hearing.
