Apple Executives Take the Spotlight in Google Antitrust Case

Apple’s senior vice president of services Eddy Cue will testify as part of the US v. Google antitrust trial on Tuesday amid reports that Apple tried to block his appearance. Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen was the first to report Cue’s appearance on Friday.

Last week, Apple’s senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, John Giannandrea — who also led Google’s search business for eight years until 2018 — gave testimony in two closed-door sessions.

When Cue testifies on Sept. 26, he will be Apple’s second executive to take the stand. It’s unclear if his testimony will be held in a closed-door session, too, as all parties involved, including the judge, have favored a high level of secrecy regarding the proceedings.

The US v. Google trial is the tech world’s most consequential antitrust test in the 22 years since the U.S. government sued Microsoft. In Google’s case, the Justice Department alleges that Google has used illegal means to ensure its search engine remains the biggest in the market and edge out any competition.

Apple has a major role to play: It has multi-billion dollar deals with Google to make its search engine the default for Apple’s products and the Safari browser. 

The Department of Justice alleges that this kind of deal effectively cements Google’s 90% market share in search while unfairly stifling competitors like DuckDuckGo and Microsoft’s Bing.

“Google pays billions of dollars each year to distributors — including popular-device manufacturers such as Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung … to secure default status for its general search engine,” the Justice Department alleged in the original complaint, filed in 2020.

The trial has been running for three weeks and has seven more to go.