Microsoft CEO testifies against Google’s search engine dominance

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed on Monday that Google's dominance as a search engine was a result of unfair practices by the company, preventing Bing, from succeeding.

On Monday, in a crowded courtroom in Washington, D.C., Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave testimony as part of the government's historic antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The Justice Department is accusing Google of abusing the ubiquity of its search engine's supremacy to stifle rivalry and creativity at the expense of customers, accusations that are reminiscent of a case Microsoft faced in the late 1990s.

Nadella claimed that contracts that made Google's browser the default one on desktops and cellphones were to blame for the company's hegemony. He brushed off the notion that social media platforms or more specialized search engines like Amazon or artificial intelligence had significantly altered the industry in which Microsoft competes with Google.

Users often don't have a lot of options when it comes to changing out of the default web browsers on computers and mobile devices, according to Nadella.

In order to prove that Microsoft committed mistakes with Bing that prohibited it from competing with Google, John Schmidtlein, the main attorney for Google, questioned Nadella about instances in which people switched from using Bing to using Google even when it was set as their default search engine on their devices.

When challenged, Nadella disputed that the use of AI by Bing had caused significant changes in its market share. According to Google, the search engine business is now more competitive as a result of artificial intelligence programs like the chatbot ChatGPT.