Apple’s Eddy Cue will take the stand Tuesday in the Google antitrust case

Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, will testify at the United States against Google antitrust trial on Tuesday, as the trial enters its third week. The presence of Cue, that Apple fought to avoid, underscores Apple’s importance to the Justice Department’s case against Google, which alleges that the company’s giant search engine violates antitrust law. The news of Cue’s programming was published by Bloomberg‘s Leah Nylen and Great technology tested on X, formerly Twitter.

Cue will be the second Apple executive to testify, following Apple AI chief (and former Google executive) John Giannandrea, on Thursday and Friday. However, much of Giannandrea’s testimony took place secretly in a closed-door courtroom. It is unknown how much of Cue’s testimony will be open to the public or what exactly he will be asked. But Apple occupies a substantial role in the Justice Department’s arguments thanks to a multimillion-dollar deal that makes Google the default search engine in Safari. The Justice Department says the Google deal has kept Apple out of the search engine business, depriving users of more competition in the space and squeezing out smaller engines like DuckDuckGo, whose CEO also testified at the trial. last week.

In approximately 15 minutes of public testimony, Giannandrea suggested that Apple’s browser didn’t favor Google as much as the Justice Department claimed, at least until last week. He noted that the recently announced iOS 17 includes a setting to select a second search engine besides Google, allowing users to choose between Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. That makes switching between engines potentially easier.

Google has argued that the quality of its search engine – not its deals with Apple, Mozilla and a variety of Android phone makers and wireless service providers – is responsible for its dominance. By comparison, it points to Microsoft’s default location of Bing on the Windows operating system, something that hasn’t given Bing a significant boost in the market.

But Google pays a considerable sum for a prime position in both the Apple and Android ecosystems; The Department of Justice has referred to an amount of “more than $10 billion” paid to Apple annually, although the exact price remains unknown. And other search engine makers argue that it’s nearly impossible to get loyal followers to rival it. “If you change some of these defaults you will eventually go back to Google if you do nothing.” complained DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg in a testimonial.

Weinberg said DuckDuckGo made a “quixotic” but unsuccessful effort to implement its privacy-focused search engine in browsers’ incognito mode and was hampered by Google deals. Google, for its part, noted that DuckDuckGo has failed to get a boost from European laws requiring users to choose a search engine, although Weinberg responded by saying the choice screens were poorly designed.

Beyond the arguments presented in court about Google’s search dominance, the United States against Google The trial has been marked by a high level of secrecy surrounding the company’s economic transactions. Justice Amit Mehta declared before trial that he planned to be “conservative” in allowing potentially sensitive details to reach the public, saying: “I’m not someone who understands the industry and the markets like you, and that’s why I take it seriously when companies tell me that.” “If this gets out, it will cause competitive harm.” Mehta expressed displeasure after the Justice Department posted online copies of some evidence seen in public court sessions, prompting the department to take the documents offline while it negotiated a deal with Google to continue publishing them. A resolution to that dispute was expected last week but was never reached, although we may see news on that front on Tuesday along with Cue.