Proactive Investors - A former Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) executive has testified that the search engine giant hired staff to win positions as a default search engine with mobile phone companies.
Chris Barton, who was hired by Google in April 2004 to form strategic partnerships with mobile phone network carriers such as Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), gave testimony in a district court on the second day of a landmark antitrust case yesterday.
He said staff were hired into his department to aggressively secure exclusivity for Google as a default search engine on smartphones and other mobile devices.
When questioned by prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice, Barton said that the new hires would negotiate agreements to ensure Google was the main default search engine provider for mobile phone operators and manufacturers.
Barton, who worked for Google until January 2010, testified that he persuaded companies to choose Google by saying they would generate advertising revenue from user clicks.
“I faced a challenge because mobile carriers became fixed on revenue share percentage,” Barton said in court, who according to his LinkedIn profile formed partnerships with the world’s largest mobile carriers that drove “hundreds of millions in revenue”.
This aggressive tactic was used as Google’s rival browser Bing was rolled out on Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) devices. Barton said he worried that smartphone users would find it “difficult” to install Google if Bing was the default.
Emails between Google executives from 2011 show that around that time AT&T had opted for Yahoo and Verizon chose Bing as their default search engines.
Google’s chief economist Hal Varian was meanwhile questioned about how Google utilises user data generated by clicks to adapt future searches.
Antonio Rangel, a behavioural economist at the California Institute of Technology, testified for the government arguing that Google defaults discouraged users from switching to other search engines. While Google defence lawyer John Schmidtlein said on the opening day of the trial on Tuesday that it took four clicks or “taps” to change browsers if Google was installed as the default search engine, Rangel argued that it took him ten steps to switch browser.
Google has dominated the search engine market, growing to occupy a more than 90% share.
In the opening remarks for the trial on Tuesday, federal prosecutors said that the search engine operator paid over US$10 billion a year in payments to secure itself as the main search engine for companies like Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Samsung Electronics (LON:0593xq) and browser operators such as Mozilla.
District Judge Amit Mehta is expected to issue a ruling early next year on the antitrust trial, which is expected to last for ten weeks.