Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday expressed concerns that Google could extend its dominance into the field of artificial intelligence (AI) should its online search monopoly continue.

Nadella, who appeared as a witness in the Google antitrust trial at the U.S. Federal Court in Washington, D.C., argued that Google could now use its advantage and scale to build tools to dominate the emerging artificial intelligence industry.

The U.S. Department of Justice has alleged that Google has been maintaining its dominant position in the search engine market by paying money to hardware and software companies and this anticompetitive behavior has limited market competition.

Nadella said Microsoft had tried to win deals for the default positions on browsers and smartphones for Bing but had not been very successful.

Nadella expressed concerns that if Google secures content exclusivity rights using the substantial revenue it generates from search advertising, it could accelerate its dominance in the AI market as well. He emphasized that allowing Google to maintain its monopoly in the basic search engine would result in an even larger influence in the AI market.

According to market tracker StatCounter, Google maintains a 91.58 percent global search engine market share as of September in a dominant monopoly. Nadella acknowledged Google’s market dominance while also revealing that Microsoft has invested $10 billion in its search platform Bing.

Nadella added that Apple uses Microsoft to raise the price it charges Google, and Google will not keep paying Apple if there is no competition in the search market.

The U.S. Department of Justice believes that Google paid Apple between $4 billion and $7 billion to be the default search engine in Apple’s iOS web browser Safari by 2020.

Last week, other Microsoft executives, including Mikhail Parakhin, who leads advertising, talked about the search business.

In response, Google has argued that being the default search engine is not overwhelmingly powerful, and users have the choice to switch to another search engine if they prefer. On Monday, Google’s lead litigator John Schmidtlein tried to weaken Nadella’s testimony by suggesting that Microsoft’s failure to compete with Google was due to an inferior product and insufficient investment.

While a big part of the trial has focused on Google’s past actions, Nadella shifted some of the attention to the future and AI. Nadella expressed concerns that Google might make exclusive deals for online content to train its AI tools.

By Jeong Ho-jun and Minu Kim

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