TRIAL UPDATE # 9: Google Paid $26.3 Billion Secretly to Big Tech to Maintain Its Search Monopoly in Big Tech
October 27, 2023
Week 7 of this landmark largely secretive 10-week trial taking on $1.7 trillion Google’s monopoly in search, ended with a big reveal: $26.3 billion.
That’s the amount of money that left Google’s pockets in 2021 to go into the pockets of the world’s biggest tech companies making devices and mobile phones, so that Google is the search default on their browsers. That’s the amount it paid to ensure its monopoly in search. A bit over 10% of its search ad revenue and 270% increase in Google’s traffic acquisition costs in under a decade.
$26.3 billion is a bargain for monopoly maintenance. It is
more than the GDP of 69 countries
equal to the whole budget of the state of Nevada
more than PG&E’s annual revenue
2 years of AirBnB’s revenue
This week kicked off with testimony from Google manager Jason Krueger about Google’s search ads platform SA360 and its ad tracking system Floodlight and whether Google has the exclusive ability to build robust products for advertisers. Much like Google falsely claims users can easily switch Search defaults, Krueger said advertisers can get the “exact same outcome” from Floodlight data with Microsoft Ads with “additional steps required as advertisers would need to import their data from Microsoft into SA360.”
We heard testimony from Google’s Senior VP Prabhakar Raghavan. He disagreed with the DOJ that Google was a “one-stop shop”. Giving an odd example: he said if users are looking for a hotel, they don’t care if Hotels.com can’t tell them the height of the Eiffel Tower. Google’s next witness was Edward Fox, an engineering expert who put together an experiment to demonstrate that scale doesn’t matter. Our understanding is that his experiment is not rigorous and it seems designed to give Google the answer it wants.
The inconsistencies around secrecy continue in this trial. We saw a long delayed discussion on the logistics of media access to trial exhibits and evidence.
Only a few more weeks until the most important trial to hit big tech in decades ends and it's appalling that the judge didn’t prioritize a solution early on, but we are finally seeing him push back.
On Monday, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, the most high-profile witness in the landmark trial, will take the witness stand.
Pichai hasn’t even entered the courtroom yet, but his emails from 2007 shown as exhibits in court have already made headlines. In that damning email, before he became CEO, Pichai expressed concern about Google’s default search agreement with Apple, writing, “I don’t think it is a good user experience, nor are the optics good for us to be the only provider in the browser.” The New York Post has reported through sources that Pichai will be pushed by the Department of Justice on Monday to explain why he told employees in at least one recorded chat from 2021 to “change the setting of this group to history off.” The plaintiffs in their filing noted that just nine seconds after Pichai wrote the group that message, he “attempted (unsuccessfully) to delete this incriminating message.” The filing said the “the newly produced chats reveal a companywide culture of concealment coming from the very top, including CEO Sundar Pichai.”
We’ll be in court next week to keep you updated on the most important anti-monopoly trial to hit the US in decades.