The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, is scheduled to testify on Monday in a historic US antitrust trial. The trial centers on claims that Google holds a monopoly in the fields of search and search advertising.
Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, is probably going to talk about the business’s competitive initiatives, especially in the mobile and search advertising spaces. The reason Google spends billions of dollars a year to keep its default smartphone search position is a mystery to the government.
The United States government has claimed that Google, which owns over 90% of the search industry, is illegally giving telecom companies like AT&T and smartphone makers like Apple an estimated $10 billion annually. They said that by paying Google to continue being the default search engine on their devices, the search engine giant was able to monopolize the lucrative advertising sector and increase its revenues.
Google maintained that its investments are intended to sustain competitiveness in its search and advertising businesses, supporting these revenue-sharing arrangements as legal. The business asserted that consumers who are unhappy with the default settings have the option to change search providers.
The verdict in this case may have a big impact on Google and the whole tech sector. It will be interesting to see how the proceedings are affected by Pichai’s testimony.