Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, took the stand on Wednesday during the remedies phase of the company’s search antitrust trial, and offered a simple message. The US government’s plan to rectify Google’s search monopoly, he said, would be so crushing to Google Search that it might be hard to justify continuing to build a search engine at all.
Pichai was called by Google in its defense, the second witness in its portion of the trial after the Department of Justice finished more than a week of its own questioning. John Schmidtlein, one of Google’s lead attorneys, first led Pichai through a tour of Google’s R&D investments, asking him how much the company has spent on Search, AI, and other projects. (The answer: about $49 billion just last year.) Then he asked Pichai about the government’s proposal to require Google to share much of its search data, and its search index, with competitors at a “marginal cost.”
Pichai said the data-sharing proposal would be a disaster. He called it “far-reaching” and “extraordinary,” appearing on the stand practically flummoxed by the very idea of the proposal. He said that requiring Google to give up all the data in its search index, and the ways it rank …
