WASHINGTON (CN) — Nearly seven weeks after the federal government’s landmark antitrust case against Google started, the tech giant finally began its defense portion of the trial on Thursday.
Attorneys for Google have rejected the government’s claims that the company holds monopoly power over internet searches by stamping out competition and shelling out billions of dollars to make itself the default search engine on devices.
Instead, Google argues its dominance is a result of its superior products and consumer preferences.
Prabhakar Raghavan — a senior vice president at Google in charge of products like Google Search, Google Maps and Google Ads — took the stand Thursday. In court, he spoke about the competition Google faces, apparently in hopes of chipping away at the idea that the company is an untouchable titan in the search engine market.
Answering questions from Google attorney Michael Sommer of the firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Raghavan testified that Google faces three “buckets” of competition: other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo, travel or shopping-specific sites like Amazon and Booking.com, and social media sites like Facebook or TikTok.
TikTok was a focus of Raghavan’s testimony, as he made repeated references to the video app’s search functionality. He said there were concerns at Google that as younger people continue gravitating toward the app, it could impact the company’s ad revenue.
Raghavan said the company had been dubbed “Grandpa Google” among young people on the internet — although interestingly, searches for that term on Google, X and TikTok only brought up reporting on Raghavan’s testimony today.
“Grandpa Google knows the answers and will help you with homework,” Raghavan said. “But when it comes to doing interesting things, they like to start elsewhere.”
Raghavan’s references to TikTok’s search functionality appeared to come from a misunderstanding of the app and how the function works. Users can only search for content within the app itself. A search for “Grandpa Google” on TikTok will only provide results from TikTok videos.
Justice Department attorney Joshua Hafenbrack jumped on this misunderstanding in his cross-examination — arguing that while TikTok can be considered a competitor in terms of ad revenue, it cannot be considered a true rival in the realm of internet search.
He also pushed back against the references to Amazon, Booking.com, Instagram and other e-commerce and social media sites as true rivals to Google’s dominance. He noted that in the case of Amazon, research conducted by Google itself had shown there was “no negative impact of shopping queries moving away from Google.”
Hafenbrack pointed to one example of such research from 2019, dubbed “Project Charlotte." That research found that even after users became a “shopping loyalty member” with Amazon by signing up for Amazon Prime, there was no impact on search ads revenue for Google over a 12-week period.
Raghavan ackowledged that the study had found that most Amazon Prime users still use Google search to research products they’ll purchase on Amazon.
Later in Hafenbrack’s questioning, he moved to display a chart showing that Google’s server latency — the time it takes between a user entering search and the results popping up — had shot up between 2011 and 2020, rising from approximately 150 milliseconds to 600 milliseconds.
Google attorney John Schmidtlein, of the firm Williams & Connolly, quickly raised an objection to keep part of that document redacted — a consistent practice Google has used throughout the trial to keep supposed trade secrets from public view.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, had previously allowed many exhibits to remain redacted, closing the courtroom rather than presenting them publicly.
In this case, though, he pushed back against Google’s request, demanding an actual explanation for why this particular document should remain redacted. Schmidtlein could not provide one, and Hafebrack was allowed to display it without redactions.
The incident marked a stark change in the overall tenor of the case, which has been criticized as overly secretive for a case affecting people across the globe.
The refusal to redact this time could be seen as a sign that Mehta is working to address those criticisms. That shift could be particularly important in the coming weeks, as Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to testify on Monday and as Google aims to wrap their case before the end of the month.
Mehta, who is expected to issue a ruling early next year, is tasked with determining whether Google’s business practices violated the law. If he rules against Google, a second trial will begin in 2024 to determine the proper punishment.
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