By Jody Godoy
(Reuters) -Google would be discouraged to invest in search engine technology if antitrust enforcers succeed in their bid to make the company share data with rivals, the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai testified on Wednesday morning at a trial in Washington.
Pichai is testifying in the Alphabet unit’s defense against proposals by the U.S. Department of Justice including selling its Chrome web browser to boost competition among online search providers.
Provisions that would require the company to share its search index and search query data are “extraordinary,” and amount to a “defacto divestiture of our IP related to search,” Pichai said.
“It would be trivial to reverse engineer and effectively build Google search from the outside,” he said.
That would make it “unviable to invest in R&D the way we have for the past two decades,” Pichai added.
The outcome of the case could fundamentally reshape the internet by potentially unseating Google as the go-to portal for information online.
The DOJ and a broad coalition of state attorneys general are pressing for remedies to restore competition even as search evolves to overlap with generative AI products such as ChatGPT. Prosecutors are concerned that Google’s dominance in search could extend to AI.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled last year that Google, the site and app where most U.S. internet users search for information, “has no true competitor.” Google maintained its monopoly in part by paying billions of dollars to companies including Apple, Samsung, AT&T and Verizon to be the default search engine on new mobile devices, the judge said.
The DOJ wants the judge to end those payments and require Google to share search data with competitors.
Google has said the proposals would give away its hard work, and jeopardize its users’ privacy and endanger smaller companies like Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser, that rely on Google for revenue.
The company recently loosened its agreements to allow device makers and carriers to pre-install other search and AI apps, according to evidence shown at trial. Google has said it plans to appeal once the judge makes a final ruling.
(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and Nick Zieminski)
