Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella arrives at federal court on October 2, 2023 in Washington, DC. Nadella is testifying in the antitrust trial to determine if Alphabet Inc.’s Google maintains a monopoly in the online search business, which is expected to last into November.
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When it comes to online search, it’s Google’s web and everyone else is playing in it, according to rival Microsoft.
That was the essence of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s testimony in federal court on Monday as part of the government’s antitrust trial against Google. Nadella told the court that Google’s dominant market share in online search means that publishers and advertisers shape their content to Google’s requirements, making it harder for competitors like Microsoft’s Bing to gain a foothold.
“Everybody talks about the open web, but there is really the Google web,” Nadella said from the stand in Washington, D.C., District Court. Nadella was referring to the way publishers often cater their content and advertising to Google’s products, like by optimizing their pages for how Google ranks search results.
Nadella was questioned by lawyers for the Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general who are suing Google for allegedly violating antitrust laws by illegally maintaining a monopoly in the general search market. The government argues that Google locked up distribution channels for general search engines through exclusive deals with browser and phone makers to be the default choice on various devices. Perhaps the most famous of those deals is the multibillion-dollar agreement between Google and Apple to make Google search the default on Apple products like the iPhone.
The government has tried to make the case that Google’s dominance, aided by these exclusive deals, creates a flywheel effect, where greater exposure to users leads to more data to make Google’s search results better and attracts more advertisers to the product. That, in turn, generates more…
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