Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: Google's unfair practices made it a 'dominant' search engine

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Google's dominance was due to agreements that made it the default browser on smartphones and computers.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that unfair tactics used by Google led to its dominance as a search engine, tactics that in turn have thwarted his company's rival programme, Bing.

Nadella testified in a packed Washington, DC, courtroom as part of the government's landmark antitrust trial against Google's parent company, Alphabet where lawyers from the US Department of Justice are attempting to persuade a federal judge that Google has illegally paid billions to Apple and others to preserve its monopoly.

The Justice Department alleges Google has abused the dominance of its ubiquitous search engine to throttle competition and innovation at the expense of consumers, allegations that echo a similar case brought against Microsoft in the late 1990s.

Microsoft's Bing has been trying since 2009 to build market share against Google, but Nadella said it could never compete against the search engine behemoth, largely due to its arrangements with Apple.

"You can call it popular, but to me it's dominant," Satya Nadella told a Google lawyer during tense cross-examination.

He said Google's dominance was due to agreements that made it the default browser on smartphones and computers, adding that users fundamentally don't have much choice in switching out of default web browsers on cell phones and computers.

"We are one of the alternatives but we're not the default," he said.

The three-month trial is the biggest US antitrust case against a big tech company since the same department took on Microsoft more than two decades ago over the dominance of its Windows operating system.

Nadella broadly backed the government's contention that Google's intake of data from being the world's preeminent search engine created a network effect that only made Google a more powerful tool to advertisers and users.

"It becomes even harder to break through when you don't have (market) share," Nadella said.

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