This file photo taken by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in Redmond, Washington, depicts a file that was taken on February 7, 2023.
WASHINGTON - Microsoft's chief executive Satya Nadella said Monday that tech giants were competing for vast troves of content needed to train artificial intelligence, and said Google was blocking content with expensive and exclusive deals with publishers.
The U.S. argued that Google wants too much information kept secret in its trials.
The US Justice Department's antitrust battle over Google is centered around distribution agreements. The government alleges that Google pays 10 billion annually to smartphone makers like Apple and wireless carriers like AT&T to be the default search engine on their devices.
Google's dominance in search has made it a significant player in the lucrative advertising industry, boosting its profits.
But without naming Google, Mr. Shepherd said it was 'problematic' if other companies locked up exclusive deals with big content makers.
s going to write this check and it's exclusive and you have to match it, he said.
Nadella testified that Microsoft had sought to make Bing search engine the default on Apple phones, but was rebuffed.
Microsoft and Google will both pay big for AI, which will pay big for Microsoft and Google in the long term.
On occasions, Google's lead lawyer, John Schmidtlein, pressed Nadella when Microsoft did win default status on phones and computers, but users still bypassed Bing and continued to use Google by a large margin.
Schmidtlein asserted that Microsoft had made a range of strategic mistakes that led to Bing's inability to gain a foothold, such as a failure to invest in servers or engineers to improve Bing and a failure to see the mobile revolution.
Sissie Hsiao, Google's vice-president, and general manager for Google Assistant's business unit, speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, California on May 10, 2023.
Schmidtlein also said Microsoft's success in becoming the default - on some Verizon phones in 2008 and BlackBerry and Nokia in 2011 - ended with the same result: users bypassed Bing and did the vast majority of their searches on Google.
Microsoft is facing an antitrust lawsuit from German rivals in the EU.
In laptops, most of which use Microsoft operating systems, Bing is the standard search engine and has a market share below 20 percent, Nadella said.
She added in a reference to Google's dominance in search.
When Nadella asks court why Apple would switch to Bing given the Microsoft product's lower quality, Judge Amit Mehta, who will decide the case.
The question suggest Google's argument that it is dominant because it is quality and not because of illegal activity has caught the judge's eye.
Microsoft has unbundled the Office app in response to antitrust concerns.
In 2014, Nadella became Microsoft's CEO, following the tech giant's own federal antitrust lawsuit. The battle between Microsoft and Google was a complicated one, resulting in a settlement in 2001 that forced Microsoft to discontinue business practices and open the door to companies like Google.
As Google, established in 1998, became an industry-leading search engine, the two became bitter rivals. Both have browsers, search engines, email services, and a range of other overlaps. Microsoft and Google are rivals in artificial intelligence more recently, with the company investing heavily in OpenAI and Google building the Bard AI chatbot.