Former Google CEO Fires Back at Justice Department's Antitrust Suit
October 21 2020 - 4:23PM
Dow Jones News
By Rob Copeland
Former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt offered a
full-throated defense of the search company, criticizing the
government's day-old antitrust suit as misguided, unduly influenced
by politics and a distraction from more serious issues facing the
technology industry.
Mr. Schmidt, a board member of Google parent Alphabet Inc. until
last year, made the remarks in a keynote interview at The Wall
Street Journal's Tech Live conference on Wednesday. The longtime
liberal political donor described the suit as "largely driven by
Republicans, at the end of a term of a president whose polling
indicates that he's unlikely to be re-elected."
He said he doesn't believe Google did anything illegal.
"Someone needs to say this," said Mr. Schmidt, 65 years old and
visibly frustrated at points. "I'm unfettered by the corporate
rules now that I'm no longer a board member, nor an employee. I can
say what I actually think."
On Tuesday, the Justice Department filed a federal lawsuit
against Google, asserting that the company preserves a monopoly
through anticompetitive tactics. The suit particularly called out a
series of agreements to make Google the default search engine on
phones of virtually all U.S. carriers, as well as other deals that
encourage mobile carriers to preload Google software onto their
equipment.
Google called the lawsuit deeply flawed and said it planned a
vigorous challenge.
Mr. Schmidt made clear that he, too, felt the government's logic
was misguided. "There's a difference between dominance and
excellence," he said. He described Google as having "ruthless"
competition -- particularly from Microsoft Corp., whose Bing search
engine runs a far second-place to Google in search volume. He
observed that while he was CEO, until 2011, he studied closely the
government's decadelong antitrust case against Microsoft, and was
careful to avoid tripping any wires.
"We worked really hard to avoid any illegal activity," he said.
"It's bad public policy to use antitrust to regulate."
A Justice Department spokesperson didn't have an immediate
comment.
Mr. Schmidt retains influence at Google. He is one of Alphabet's
largest shareholders and, along with the company co-founders, has
special shares that give him disproportionate say into company
decision making. He said in the interview that he hadn't yet spoken
with Google executives about the suit.
He offered several suggestions to policy makers of where they
might spend their time instead of probing his former employer.
"The most obvious candidate for regulation are the excesses in
the social-networking space," he said. "The concept of social
networks, broadly speaking, as amplifiers for idiots and crazy
people is not what we intended."
He also said the U.S. ought to focus on China, rather than
Google, in part because Big Tech is a big driver of the domestic
economy.
"The competition between China and the United States is the one
to watch, " he said, "because if we lose that one, 50 years of
growth is in peril."
He said that the U.S. needs to develop a cohesive strategy that
recognizes China as both a rival and a partner, and that the
splintered internet -- with each country developing separate online
ecosystems -- is "a total disaster."
Brent Kendall contributed to this article.
Write to Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 21, 2020 16:08 ET (20:08 GMT)
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