On Friday, Google started defending its search business during the Justice Department's monopoly trial. Among the first witnesses called was Google's senior vice president responsible for search, Prabhakar Raghavan, who testified that Google's default agreements with makers of popular mobile phones and web browsers were "the company's biggest cost" in 2021, Bloomberg Law reported.
Raghavan's testimony for the first time revealed that Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 for default agreements, seemingly investing in default status for its search engine while raking in $146.4 billion in revenue from search advertising that year. Those numbers had increased "significantly" since 2014, Big Tech on Trial reported, when Google's search ad revenue was approximately 46 billion and traffic acquisition cost was approximately $7.1 billion.
[...]
Pichai will likely provide additional insights into how Google's smart investments are responsible for creating the search empire it maintains today, Reuters reported. But he will also likely face the DOJ's inquiries into why Google invests so much in default agreements if it's not a critical part of the tech giant's strategy to stay ahead of the competition.The DOJ is not likely to back down from its case that default agreements unfairly secured Google's search market dominance. On Friday, Big Tech on Trial reporter Yosef Weitzman—who has been posting updates from the trial on X—suggested that things have gotten tense in the courtroom now that the "DOJ seems emboldened to push for more information to be public after Judge Mehta's comments yesterday that not all numbers need to remain redacted."
According to Weitzman, the DOJ today pushed to "make public the 20 search queries Google makes the most revenue off of, as well as Google's traffic acquisition costs related to search (the total amount of money Google paid to partners in search distribution revenue shares)."
Previously:
Google, DOJ Still Blocking Public Access to Monopoly Trial Docs, NYT Says 20231020
Microsoft CEO Warns of "Nightmare" Future for AI If Google's Search Dominance Continues 20231004
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Microsoft CEO warns of 'nightmare' future for AI if Google's search dominance continues
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned on Monday of a "nightmare" scenario for the internet if Google's dominance in online search is allowed to continue, a situation, he said, that starts with searches on desktop and mobile but extends to the emerging battleground of artificial intelligence.
Nadella testified on Monday as part of the US government's sweeping antitrust trial against Google, now into its 14th day. He is the most senior tech executive yet to testify during the trial that focuses on the power of Google as the default search engine on mobile devices and browsers around the globe.
[...] even more worrisome, Nadella argued, is that the enormous amount of search data that is provided to Google through its default agreements can help Google train its AI models to be better than anyone else's — threatening to give Google an unassailable advantage in generative AI that would further entrench its power.
[...] In addition to training its models on search queries, Google has also been moving to secure agreements with content publishers to ensure that it has exclusive access to their material for AI training purposes, according the Microsoft CEO. In Nadella's own meetings with publishers, he said that he now hears that Google "wants ... to write this check and we want you to match it." (Google didn't immediately respond to questions about those deals.)
The requests highlight concerns that "what is publicly available today [may not be] publicly available tomorrow" for AI training, according to the testimony.
Dozens of exhibits from the Google antitrust trial are still being hidden from the public, The New York Times Company alleged in a court filing today.
According to The Times, there are several issues with access to public trial exhibits on both sides. The Department of Justice has failed to post at least 68 exhibits on its website that were shared in the trial, The Times alleged, and states have not provided access to 18 records despite reporters' requests.
[...]
Currently, The Times said it is seeking to unseal redactions in two exhibits, and it remains "unclear why the exhibits have been redacted" because "they date to 2007 and relate to a version of an agreement between Apple and Google that has not been operative for more than a decade."Perhaps most notably, The Times has also asked the court to unseal testimony from Apple exec Eddy Cue and Google vice president and general manager of ads, Jerry Dischler, in their entirety.
"The Court has upheld redactions to certain transcripts in the absence of a showing by the parties on the public record that the sealing is justified and without providing its own 'full explanation of the basis for the redactions," The Times alleged, "even though some of the redactions have been applied to material that is both of great public interest and goes to the core of the litigation."
Previously:
Microsoft CEO Warns of "Nightmare" Future for AI If Google's Search Dominance Continues
In mid-June 2019, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella received a rude awakening in an email warning that Google had officially gotten too far ahead on AI and that Microsoft may never catch up without investing in OpenAi.
With the subject line "Thoughts on OpenAI," the email came from Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, who is also the company's executive vice president of AI. In it, Scott said that he was "very, very worried" that he had made "a mistake" by dismissing Google's initial AI efforts as a "game-playing stunt."
[...] As just one example, Scott warned, "their auto-complete in Gmail, which is especially useful in the mobile app, is getting scarily good."
Microsoft had tried to keep this internal email hidden, but late Tuesday it was made public as part of the US Justice Department's antitrust trial over Google's alleged search monopoly.
[...] In an order unsealing the email among other documents requested by The Times, US District Judge Amit Mehta allowed to be redacted some of the "sensitive statements in the email concerning Microsoft's business strategies that weigh against disclosure"—which included basically all of Scott's "thoughts on OpenAI."
[...] Mere weeks later, Microsoft had invested $1 billion into OpenAI, and there have been billions more invested since through an extended partnership agreement. In 2024, the two companies' finances appeared so intertwined that the European Union suspected Microsoft was quietly controlling OpenAI and began investigating whether the companies still operate independently. Ultimately, the EU dismissed the probe, deciding that Microsoft's $13 billion in investments did not amount to an acquisition, Reuters reported.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by gawdonblue on Thursday November 02 2023, @08:18PM (1 child)
Versus the little guy [youtube.com].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday November 02 2023, @09:53PM
Except the "little guys" are the likes of Microsoft and Apple. Which to be honest aren't little, but Google has probably spent hundreds of billions or more to maintain their search dominance. You'd almost be stupid to not take the free $$B, if you were Apple. Eventually, Google may end up getting busted up or what not. At which point, it may make a lot more sense for Apple to create their own as well. They'll certainly have enough money to create roll their own at that point, too.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2023, @09:09PM
Yeah [yahoo.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Thursday November 02 2023, @10:07PM (5 children)
I'm given to understand our anti-trust laws are based on harm to competition and if so that's a shame. I'd really like to see the trial focus on the disappearance of search results, the absolute devastation to the "long tail" of results, the inability to find things that you knew were there before, aka, the "enshitification" of search. That's done way more harm to consumers than the stupid default. One of these things can be over-ridden if you care. The other can't.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday November 03 2023, @01:27AM
I remember looking up what used to be common knowledge 20 years ago and not finding anything about it because it was just newer results, even when wrong it irrelevant. I blame Google for pretty much destroying search. Some loss of abilities was inevitable due to the growth of the net, but they didn't even bother to try to maintain a decent engine
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 03 2023, @02:33AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday November 03 2023, @04:06AM (2 children)
The search results are gone because the content is gone. There is effectively zero content on the Web that is not behind the top dozen or so sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and a lot of content is also moving off the Web into TikTok, Discord, etc.
This is in spite of Google's efforts because Google unlike Facebook et al actually benefits from a thriving open Web.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday November 03 2023, @03:21PM
This might be a big part of it, but I used to find stuff from the Green Site that I remembered via Google search. I used to find it by phrase. At some point that became impossible, so I went back there and used their archive, flipping through dozens of pages because I remembered something like, "it was in fall of 2002".
There was also some interesting stuff at a .edu domain that I was going to use to refute an argument, but when I got ready to do that, POOF! It was gone. Professors generally don't nuke their pages. The university might pull them after they retire. I have a feeling that content is still there, just no longer indexed and that might feed in to what you're describing--if Google won't index your content, it might as well be on FaceBook where at least it has a chance of being retained; but then you're bound to that platform which is a world of Zuck.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday November 04 2023, @05:09PM
The search results are gone because the content is gone.
This is patent nonsense. Most of the good content that was there a quarter century ago still is, although web sites do disappear. It's not that the content is gone, there is more than twice as much good content as then but it's buried under thousands of times as much useless commercial garbage that Google always floats to the top.
There's a great opportunity for one of you bright young folks to eat Google's lunch. Just make a search engine that works. It pisses me off that they have removed most of the usefull search tools, e.g. adding -water floats "water" to the top of the results rather than getting rid of results with that term, like it used to be.
How about a search engine with a title and author search? Come on, guys, are you all really so lame that it's beyond you?
Impeach Donald Palpatine and his sidekick Elon Vader
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2023, @11:57PM (1 child)
"Big Tits"
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Friday November 03 2023, @10:36AM
Jays and finches will be mad when they find out!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2023, @08:43AM (2 children)
The fact that Microsoft has been pestering people to stick to Edge (and IE) as the default browser and failing in millions of cases is evidence that even many "normal" people can and will switch from the defaults.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday November 03 2023, @01:32PM (1 child)
DDG is good enough. I've been full-time DDG for a good while now. I use DDG for very similar reasons to why I use Firefox.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2023, @02:30PM