Google's defiant in court, flagging new Apple deal

#320: CEO Sundar Pichai warns that breaking Google would damage privacy, destroy US supremacy and enable competitors to steal its innovation...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been back in court as the grandstand witness to defend the search giant from break-up.

And it was a tough performance from the three-time convicted monopolist.

Pichai made it clear as a bell that Google does not accept the court’s ruling and will appeal all the way to the US Supreme Court.

His evidence raised eyebrows.

After being told its $26.3 billion deal with Apple to buy its default spot on iPhones and Safari was anticompetitive, Pichai said he was doing another one for Gemini AI.

He also said that breaking up Google, selling Chrome, and sharing its search data for rivals would:

• Leave billions of users “exposed in their most vulnerable moments”.

• Destroy the viability of the search giant’s massive R&D efforts, and

• Make it “trivial” for competitors to reverse engineer its search.

It was a defiant stand, and he did it before one of the three judges who ruled his company is a monopolist.

Break us up and you break what we’ve won.

But it was as if he didn’t get the memo, because that’s exactly what the Department of Justice is trying to do.

Being broken up is the price of being a three-times monopolist.

Three battles. Three losses. One consequence.

Before I get to the details…

Welcome to new subs overnight from the flagship university in Wisconsin UW-Madison, Channel4 in the UK, Digiday in New York, prominent Canadian multimedia conglomerate Rogers, exec coaches The Transformation Agency in London, New York management consultants Knowledge Agency who count AmEx, KPMG, PwC, the US Navy and Sony as clients, among others.

And a very senior exec at $126 billion media giant Comcast, which includes NBC TV, Universal Pictures, Dreamworks, MSNBC, CNBC, Peacock, Sky TV, Sky News and more. Welcome all…

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Now back to Pichai, his secret new deal with Apple, how he intends to close the gap on AI, and how he’s slow-rolling Europe as a punishment. It’s good stuff...