More from US v. Google: all the news from the search antitrust showdown

One recurring theme in Satya Nadella’s US v. Google testimony is his fear that the AI revolution could make it even harder for upstart search engines to compete. He worries publishers will sign exclusive deals that let Google use their data to train its models — meaning no one else can crawl that data.

We’re about 90 minutes into Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s testimony, and his stance so far has been simple: Google’s status as the default search engine has crushed Bing not just as a business, but as a product. Without scale and user data, he said, there’s just no keeping up.

I’m in the building for another day of US v. Google, the big antitrust search trial. On the docket today: Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who I incidentally ran into in the security line. I suspect he’ll be asked a lot of questions about Bing, selling Bing to Apple, Bing AI, “making Google dance,” and more. Word in the hallway is we’re likely to be in open court most of the day, too.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that the “embarrassing” document that Judge Amit Mehta referenced when allowing the DOJ to post documents from the Google Antitrust trial was from a “mock” training session.

The Microsoft CEO’s testimony will follow extensive questions this week about the company’s dealings with Apple and its struggle to get Bing on the iPhone, apparently including floating a sale of the search engine to Apple. And after a week of locked-down testimony, Judge Amit Mehta has directed as much of it as possible to take place in public session.

Google certainly doesn’t seem to think so. In his questioning of Apple’s Eddy Cue this afternoon, Google’s John Schmidtlein took Cue on a journey through Safari history, and Cue said that Safari’s integration of a search box and URL bar was part of what made the browser worked. And that only worked because Google was there — or so the argument goes.

Apple’s agreement with Google doesn’t allow for that, Apple’s Eddy Cue said in court. And Cue said he doesn’t want to do it anyway: “we try to get people up and running as fast as possible.” But the DOJ is showing exhibits about all the “Ask App Not To Track” screens you see, and the Appearance settings in setup, and more. Their question is: for something as important as search, shouldn’t you let people choose for themselves?

We finally got into open court in US v. Google! For the last 45 minutes or so we’ve been listening to Cue talk about the deal he and Sundar Pichai negotiated in 2016 to keep Google as the default search engine on Apple devices. So far, Cue’s stance is simple: Google is the best search engine, so Apple picked it. He says Apple never seriously thought about ditching Google for another provider, or building its own search engine.

Today’s testimony was set to start at 9:30 this morning. At 9:28, we were told to get out of the courtroom, because this morning was beginning as a closed session. Everything about this trial so far has been unusually, frankly bizarrely , frankly bizasecretive and under wraps — the reporters in the hallway with me are all betting that we’re going to be let in for five minutes at the end of the day, just to hear the plan for tomorrow that we won’t get to see either. Who knows!

I’m writing this from just outside the courtroom in DC, where Apple’s Eddy Cue is set to testify today about Apple’s billion-dollar deal to make Google its default search engine. Bloomberg reports that Cue is planning to say Apple doesn’t need to build its own search, because Google is great — but I suspect the DOJ is going to have lots of questions about that.

It is frankly shameful that Judge Amit Mehta still hasn’t ruled on opening up access to documents in this industry-shaking trial, let alone made it clear when any of the trial itself would be open to the public. Today, Apple’s John Giannandrea testified in closed court while reporters waited outside with no communication from the court at all. Ridiculous.

Google says it’s more likely than you think! The company is still fighting with the DOJ over whether to admit a potentially “embarrassing” document into evidence — the one that led to public records of the trial getting pulled off the internet. Mehta says he’ll rule on admitting the document tomorrow.

It’s the end of a locked-down day in US v. Google, culminating in some discussion of a yet-unviewed document at the center of a dispute between the two parties. And apparently we still don’t know if the Justice Department will be allowed to post exhibits from the trial (which, let’s reiterate, are public records) online. Frustrating!

Per Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen, there’s been “no word” on whether the Justice Department can keep posting exhibits online as they’re introduced in court.

Here’s the list of expected witnesses for the day as week two for this trial between the DOJ and Google kicks off, starting at 9:30AM ET:

The first day of US v. Google has wrapped up (with a blow-by-blow readthrough of an email argument from 2009, which I don’t think Google’s lawyers found as funny as I did), and I’m headed back to New York — I’ll have more details tomorrow.

I’ve just finished lunch after the Department of Justice, a group of state attorneys general, and Google made their opening arguments in today’s antitrust trial.

Judge Mehta interrupts Google’s opening statements to ask an important question: there’s all this talk about the power of defaults, and about how easy it is or is not to switch search engines, but does anyone actually switch? Google evidently doesn’t have good data on whether people do, so we might not get hard numbers here. But it’s a good question!