Two weeks ago, Google had a big day in Washington. President Biden signed an executive order to create artificial intelligence safeguards that could affect Google’s most urgent projects, and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken gave the company an award for its work helping Ukrainian refugees and promoting women’s economic security.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, had spent much of the day on the witness stand in a federal courtroom about a mile from the White House, defending his company from accusations that it was crushing rivals in search markets. and online advertising.
On Tuesday, Pichai is expected to testify again, this time in San Francisco, to confront allegations brought by video game company Epic Games that his company broke the law by exercising monopoly power over app developers in Android’s Google Play Store. .
Over the past month, Pichai has become the face of Google’s antitrust court fights on both sides of the country. And his visits to the witness stand underscore the growing importance of Big tech leaders being insightful witnesses for their companies, whether in an antitrust trial or in hearings on Capitol Hill.
Testifying under oath is a task many tech CEOs could be asked to do in the coming years, as Amazon, Meta and others face their own antitrust court fights. It’s not a task that many executives have excelled at.
Although he was never called to testify, Bill Gates, who was CEO of Microsoft in the last major technology antitrust case brought by the Justice Department more than two decades ago, was combative and evasive in his statements.
In recent years, executives like OpenAI’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman (and, of course, Pichai) have been asked to testify before Congress for various reasons, with varying degrees of success. Zuckerberg has at times exasperated lawmakers with vague answers, while Altman appeared to charm senators at a hearing this year.
The main duty on the witness stand for Pichai – a low-key, detail-oriented executive – has been to keep the temperature down during questioning and stick to the central point of Google’s antitrust defense: that it is an innovative company that has maintained their leadership through innovation and hard work rather than illegal monopolistic behavior.
The Justice Department filed its landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google in October 2020, arguing that the company’s default search deals with phone makers and browser companies helped it illegally maintain a monopoly.
Google called Pichai, 51, to the stand two weeks ago. Instead of sitting on the witness stand, Pichai stood at a lectern for nearly four hours, with a microphone on, as if he were giving a speech at a corporate conference. His handlers said he had to stand up due to a sprained lower back.
He talked about his background, how he got a phone as a pre-teen in Chennai, India, and how he then understood the power of technology, before deftly answering questions about his company’s competitive position, relationship with Apple, and default search contracts. which, according to the government, were illegal. .
Pichai attempted to refute the government lawyer’s arguments that Google paid Apple billions of dollars a year to keep it out of the search market. He presented a different story, saying his company wanted to be the iPhone’s default search engine because of the “value” of that spot and the need to ensure Apple would safeguard the user experience.
“I felt like the deal had worked well since 2016,” Pichai said. “Search usage and search revenue continued to grow.”
On cross-examination, Pichai repeated the rationale for the agreement so many times that, for a moment, he seemed to lose patience with the line of questioning and said, “I just gave all the reasons” for the agreement.
Adam Kovacevich, a tech industry lobbyist at the Progress Chamber who spent 12 years working at Google, said Pichai’s testimony gave the court a high-level view of how the company made strategic decisions.
“He did well,” Kovacevich said of Pichai’s performance. “The most important thing for me is that when you are in that position, your first goal is not to be Bill Gates in the Microsoft trial. His number one goal is to be receptive and reasonable.”
Excerpts of Mr. Gates’ combative videotaped testimony were shown in court more than two decades ago. The Microsoft co-founder, antitrust lawyers say, undermined his and his company’s credibility with the judge in the case.
In San Francisco, Pichai is expected to discuss the fierce competition between Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating systems, to undermine Epic’s argument that Google’s app store practices are monopolistic. The CEO was heavily involved in the launch of Android and he is expected to share his view that the Play Store has helped many developers expand their businesses and allowed consumers to safely download apps.
There will be one big difference: The antitrust trial in Washington has no jury. The decision will be made by a judge. In San Francisco, Pichai will have to appeal to a jury that might be open to the idea that a giant tech company is exploiting much smaller companies. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic, is also expected to testify at trial.
Google and Epic declined to comment.
Epic, the creator of the hit game Fortnite, filed the lawsuit against Google in 2020, in an attempt to avoid the 15 to 30 percent fees it must pay to Google on subscriptions and in-app purchases.
The game developer took on Google and Apple by telling users to pay for in-app transactions directly through Epic. In response, Google and Apple suspended Fortnite from their app stores. Epic claims that Google also bullied other companies into making deals with Epic before it was banned from app stores.
Google faces another antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department that accuses it of illegally abusing its monopoly power over technology that delivers online advertising.
A trial in that case could begin next year, but it is too early to know whether Mr. Pichai will be called to testify.
Pichai has tried to prevent Google employees from being distracted by the litigation. He has encouraged them to “keep doing what they are doing” and has assigned a relatively small number of employees to work on the Justice Department case: hundreds out of a total of more than 180,000.
But Pichai’s court appearances have taken time away from his other obligations as the company’s leader, including his plan to regain Google’s primacy in the fast-growing field of generative ai.
In the midst of Pichai’s testimony in October, Secretary of State Blinken was honoring Google’s subsidiary in Poland for its work to promote women’s economic security and help Ukrainian refugees. Hours later, Biden hosted a signing ceremony at the White House, but Pichai’s advisers could not confirm her attendance because there was a possibility she was still in court when she began.
“It’s not the best use of your time,” Richard Kramer, an analyst at Arete Research, a London-based investment research firm, said in an interview. “No CEO wants to waste their time being questioned by government lawyers.”
