Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing, Oct. 3 (Xinhua) Microsoft CEO Satyanadella said on Monday, Beijing time, that tech giants are competing for the huge amount of content needed to train artificial intelligence, and Google is unhappy with it by signing a high-price exclusive agreement with publishers to lock in content.

Nadella testified in an important trial against Google, the first major antitrust case since the US government sued Microsoft in 1998. Nadella testified that tech giants were scrambling to build content libraries to train their big language models, "which reminds me of the early days of distribution protocols".

The distribution agreement is at the heart of the Justice Department's antitrust crackdown on Google. Google, which accounts for 90 per cent of the search market, pays $10 billion a year to smartphone makers such as Apple and wireless operators such as AT&T to become the default search engine for its devices. The United States Department of Justice believes that this kind of behavior is not in line with the law.

With its influence in the search market, Google has become a heavyweight in the lucrative advertising market, boosting profit margins.

Nadella says the development of artificial intelligence requires computing power (servers) and data to train the software. "No problem, we are willing to invest money," he said of the server. "

But if other companies block content through exclusive agreements with large content companies, then "there is a problem". But he didn't explicitly mention Google.

"when I met with publishers, they said Google paid and signed an exclusive agreement, and you had to offer the same terms." Nadella said.

Rejected by Apple, Nadella also said that Microsoft had hoped to make Bing the default search engine for Apple smartphones, but was rejected.

Google lead lawyer John Schmidtlein reminded Nadella that Microsoft sometimes gets the default search engine status on computers and mobile phones, but there are still many users bypassing Bing and using Google.

John said Microsoft failed to gain a foothold because of a series of strategic mistakes, including not investing in hardware and talent to improve Bing, and failing to recognize the potential of the mobile revolution.

John also said that Microsoft had previously signed default search engine agreements with many companies, including Verizon in 2008 and BlackBerry and Nokia in 2011, but the result was the same: users bypassed Bing and did most of the search tasks through Google.

Nadella admits that on most laptops that use Microsoft, Bing is the default search engine, but still has less than 20% of the market.

Referring to Google's dominant position in the search market, he added: "A lot of people get up in the morning and start searching with Google after brushing their teeth."

Amit Mehta, the presiding judge in this case, asked Nadella: why should Apple switch to Bing since the quality of Microsoft products is poor?

The question suggests that judges are interested in Google's argument that Google's dominance is achieved by better product quality, not by irregularities.

Nadella became Microsoft CEO in 2014. Before that, the tech giant had been aware of federal antitrust lawsuits. The lawsuit ended in settlement in 2001, forcing Microsoft to end some of its business practices and opening the door for companies such as Google.

As Google has developed into an industry-leading search engine, the two companies have also become old rivals. Both sides have browsers, search engines, email services and a host of other overlapping services. Recently, the two companies have also competed with each other in artificial intelligence, with Microsoft investing heavily in OpenAI and Google developing Bard artificial intelligence chat robots.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.