JAKARTA CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, stated that his party hopes to reach an agreement with Apple to include AI Gemini technology into Apple's new phones by the middle of this year. This statement was made by Pichai in his testimony at an antitrust court in Washington on Wednesday, April 31.
The testimony is part of Alphabet's defense, Google's parent company, against the demands of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) which proposes ending Google's lucrative agreement with Apple, Samsung, AT&T, and Verizon as default search engines on new devices.
When asked by DOJ prosecutor Veronica Onyema, Pichai said that there is currently no official agreement with Apple regarding Gemini. But he has discussed with Apple CEO Tim Cook about the possibility of the cooperation last year. If reached, this deal will make Gemini integrated with Apple Intelligence, Apple's AI feature.
Pichai also revealed that Google plans to start experimenting with placing in its Gemini app ads.
Prosecutors considered that Google's dominance in the online search sector could expand to the AI sector. US District Judge Amit Mehta previously stated that Google maintains a partial monopoly through billions of dollars in payments to mobile operators and smartphone manufacturers in order to make Google a default search engine.
Currently, Judge Mehta is considering the steps Google should take to restore market competition. The final verdict in this case has the potential to drastically change the internet landscape, including the possibility of ending Google's dominance as the main gateway to online information search.
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The US Department of Justice and the state attorney general coalition are pushing for various improvements, including selling Chrome browsers, banning payments from becoming default search engines, and requiring Google to share search data with its competitors.
However, Pichai considered that the obligation to share such data could hinder the company's investment in research and development. He mentioned that the provisions requiring the sharing of search indexes and search query data are very extreme and are the same as de facto divestment of our intellectual property in the field of search.
"This will make outsiders easily reverse-engineer and rebuild Google Search," he said, quoted by VOI from Reuters. "And that will make R&D investments like the last two decades no longer feasible," he added.
Google stated that it would file an appeal after the judge issued the final verdict.
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