Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella said on Monday that tech giants are competing for vast amounts of content needed to train artificial intelligence, complaining that Google locks in content through expensive exclusive deals with publishers.
Nadella testified in the landmark U.S. trial against rival Google, the first major antitrust case brought in the U.S. since it sued Microsoft in 1998. Nadella testified that the tech giant built a library of content to train Its large language model efforts “remind me of the various stages of early distribution deals.”
The distribution agreement is at the center of the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust fight against Google.政府稱，佔據搜尋市場約90% 份額的Google每年向蘋果等智慧型手機製造商和AT&T 等無線營運商等非法支付100 億美元（近8,320 億盧比），以使其成為其設備上的預設search engine.
That reach in search has made Google a heavyweight in the lucrative advertising market, boosting its profits.
Nadella said that building artificial intelligence requires computing power or servers and data to train the software. On the server, he said, “No problem, we’ll be happy to put in the dollars.”
But he didn’t mention Google by name, saying it would be “problematic” if other companies struck exclusive deals with large content producers.
“When I meet with publishers now, they say Google is going to write this check and it’s exclusive and you have to match it,” he said.
Rejected by Apple
Nadella also testified that Microsoft tried to make its Bing search engine the default search engine on Apple smartphones but was rebuffed.
Google chief lawyer John Schmidtlein sometimes pressed Nadella on a time when Microsoft did win default status on computers and phones, but users still bypassed Bing and continued to use Google heavily.
Schmidtling believes that Microsoft made a series of strategic mistakes that prevented Bing from gaining a foothold, including failing to invest in servers or engineers to improve Bing and failing to see the mobile revolution.
Schmidtlein also said that Microsoft successfully became the default search engine on some Verizon phones in 2008, and the default search engine on BlackBerry and Nokia in 2011, but ended up with the same result: users bypassed Bing and searched on Google. The vast majority of searches are conducted on .
Nadella acknowledged that Bing is the default search engine on most laptops using Microsoft’s operating system, with a market share of less than 20%.
“You wake up in the morning, brush your teeth, and then you search on Google,” he added of Google’s dominance in search.
quality problem
Judge Amit Mehta, who will hear the case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asked Nadella why Apple would switch to Bing given the poor quality of Microsoft’s products.
The question showed that Google’s argument that it dominates because of its quality, not illegal activity, piqued the judge’s interest.
Nadella became Microsoft CEO in 2014, long after the tech giant faced its own federal antitrust lawsuit. The lawsuit was eventually settled in 2001, forcing Microsoft to end some business practices and opening the door for companies like Google.
As Google, founded in 1998, became the industry’s leading search engine, the two became fierce competitors. Both have browsers, search engines, email services, and many other overlapping parts. Recently, they have become rivals in the field of artificial intelligence, with Microsoft investing heavily in OpenAI and Google building the Bard AI chatbot among other investments.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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