It seems that the search engine wars never stop. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, appeared in court recently, testifying against the U.S. government’s antitrust case against Google, which began sometime back. His bold statements will be discussed below, which relate to the search engine exclusivity deal between Apple and Google. Microsoft’s Bing is improving with AI features, and even the Bard AI by Google is evolving rapidly.
Microsoft CEO Says Google Unfairly Dominates over Other Search Engines
It started with an earlier defense by Google to the U.S. Court of Justice (via Reuters), stating that the company’s focus on the quality of searches has kept its search engine the dominant one compared to competitors, such as Microsoft’s Bing.
Google has been accused of illegally paying $10-15 billion to the smartphone maker Apple, along with browser maker Mozilla and even AT&T, to maintain and secure its dominance as a monopoly in the search engine industry with a ~90% market share. When the trial began, the following was stated by the US defense:
“Defaults are powerful, scale matters, and Google illegally maintained a monopoly for more than a decade,” said Kenneth Dintzer, the Deputy Branch Director of the U.S. Department of Justice. He also stated, “This case is about the future of the internet,” and that the company knew “these agreements crossed anti-trust lines.”
As such, the US Government also accused Google of knowingly breaking anti-trust laws.
In the court session, Satya Nadella also said Microsoft was prepared to lose up to $15 billion (via The Verge) to make its search engine ‘Bing’ the default option on Apple’s devices. When a search engine gets a higher ‘query flow,’ aka the queries searched by users on the search engine, the system uses that data to improve the algorithm. Since Google has such a massive market share, the CEO of Microsoft said that other search engines simply cannot grab the relevant data to improve the searches. While Microsoft has tried to improve Bing, certain practices by Google (which reportedly violate anti-trust laws) prevent them from competing.
“The distribution advantage Google has today doesn’t go away; in fact, if anything, I worry a lot that – even in spite of my enthusiasm that there is a new angle with A.I., this vicious cycle that I’m trapped in could get even more vicious.”, said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. In addition, the Microsoft Chief also said the development of its Bing search engine has been severely affected due to these exclusivity deals.
Google maintains that its search engine is simply superior to others. However, the exclusivity deals that keep it the primary and default search engine are being pointed out heavily during the active court case. The world is watching closely as the situation develops. Several of Apple’s executives are reportedly expected to take the stand as witnesses soon. More information could come out soon, and we will keep you updated.
What are your thoughts on the anti-trust case between Google & the U.S. Court of Justice? Do you believe that Google has a monopoly in the search engine market, or are they better? Let us know in the comments below.
