The Google Trial in Washington, D.C., Aug. 27 – Witnesses and Judgment of the DOJ’s Indictment

A judge in DC is hearing the case against the company. According to the DOJ, Google entered into anticompetitive deals with Apple and other companies in order to gain preferential placement on its search engine. Ten weeks could make a difference in the balance of power online, which has been the case since the US took on Microsoft.

Along with Pichai, Google is planning to call at least 10 other witnesses. The trial is expected to last until the end of November. It’s a bench trial, so there’s no jury and the presiding judge, Judge Amit Mehta, will give the final ruling.

The United States market for search engines is dominated by Google. The company is expected to argue that people don’t have to use its search in order to use the default browser. Google says that with just a few clicks and swipes, people can easily switch to another browser — but they choose to stay.

Pichai said he was simply trying to find ways for everyone to get what they wanted, when asked about the emails in court. One thing that works well on theAndroid platform is a Google Search application. I said we could build a Google search application for Apple’s OS X platform, and we would support the product for many years.

When he first joined the company in 2004, his job involved working on the Google search toolbar. He later led the team that built the company’s Chrome browser, which predominately features Google search front and center.

The $1.7 trillion company is expected to argue that it dominates in search because it has the best technology and, so, people prefer it. On Monday, it’s bringing in a star witness to testify: Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

“Microsoft has failed to invest, failed to innovate in a manner comparable to Google, in many areas that have nothing to do with scale,” Schmidtlein said.

Throughout the course of the trial Google has brushed aside claims that its exclusive agreements with device manufacturers are what gives its business a leg up. The company doesn’t believe it’s the quality of its products. Search engines like Bing just don’t measure up, said Google’s lead lawyer John Schmidtlein during opening statements.

It became so pervasive that The New York Times and other major news organizations filed a court motion imploring the judge to ensure the case was conducted in an open courtroom.

While some information about Google’s business dealings came out in court, a lot was presented behind closed doors. More than half of the testimony was closed to the public. Throughout the course of the trail, Google continually fought to seal documents and shutter proceedings in public court.

Executives from other smaller search engines testified that the exclusive deals they were given by Google made them unable to gain market share.

The open web is talked about, but it’s not actually the case, according to Nadella. The distribution advantage has not gone away.

The Department of Justice called a lot of witnesses. They included Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who testified that he unsuccessfully tried for years to get Apple to switch the default browser on its devices from Google to Microsoft’s Bing. Without being able to do that, he said, even a company as big as Microsoft couldn’t compete.

John Kwoka, professor of economics at Northeastern University, said that the Microsoft case was the case of the century. The last century had a new potential landmark case.

For the past six weeks, the Justice Department and dozens of top state prosecutors have tried to prove that Google illegally used its monopoly power to ensure its search engine remained on top.

Apple was concerned about slowing revenue growth from their share deal, according to Pichai. Google’s overall revenue was growing much faster than the revenue Apple was getting from the partnership, executives complained — what gives? Google responded with a few ideas about what might be causing the discrepancy. The list included Siri Suggestions, a newish Apple product that aimed to help users get where they were going faster for some queries rather than sending everything to Google. But Google also pointed out, according to notes shared after the meeting by partnerships executive Don Harrison, that “Google is not in control of the amount or type of traffic received by Safari; Apple is.”

That’s when Pichai made his case. Harrison told people that people trust we get this right and trust us with the content of what they are searching for, and he spoke about it when discussing how to encourage search. Tim listened but did not react to this specifically other than noting we had different strengths.”

Pichai’s testimony covered a lot of ground, from his concept of attorney-client privilege to Google’s feisty legal reaction to Internet Explorer 7’s launch in 2005. The deal with Apple seemed to linger over everything.