Google’s Sundar Pichai Warned Against Bad ‘Optics’ Over Search Engine Deal With Apple

Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai internally warned about the “bad optics” Google search engine partnership with Apple years before he took the reins at the tech giant.

Pichai’s emails with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, dating back to 2007, were shared as evidence in court during the Justice Department’s ongoing antitrust trial alleging Google abused its dominant position in the market and engaged in practices that stifled competitors.

Pichai, who at the time was head of Google’s Chrome browser, raised concerns over the company’s arrangement with the iPhone maker and said it could affect user experience on browsers.

“I know we are insisting on default, but at the same time I think we should encourage them to have Yahoo as a choice in the pull down or some other easy option,” Pichai wrote in the email; this issue is now at the center of the Justice Department’s case. “I don’t think it is a good user experience nor the optics is great for us to be the only provider in the browser.”

The government alleges that Google pays Apple $10 billion to remain the default search engine on Apple devices, including the iPhone. “Defaults are the only thing that matters,” he told the court. “It would be a game changer [for Bing] to be a default on Safari," Microsoft’s Satya Nadella told the court, emphasizing that pre-configurations shape user choices.

The lawsuit has so far seen a string of high profile executives at Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Google rival DuckDuckGo, take the stand to testify about their experiences with Alphabet’s search business and efforts to compete against it.