The CEO of internet search engine DuckDuckGo On Thursday, testified in court that his company had trouble expanding its market share because Google was paying major companies enormous sums of money to have its search engine set as the default on computers and mobile devices.
The testimony of DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg at a trial in Washington to establish whether Alphabet’s Google violated US antitrust law was intended to bolster the U.S. government’s claim that Google’s deep pockets were used to unfairly restrain its smaller competitors.
Due to Google’s agreements with the companies, Weinberg claimed in testimony that he had pressured specific businesses—he did not identify them—to adopt DuckDuckGo as the default and had met with some interest but ultimately no success.
According to the government, Google, which controls 90% of the search market, allegedly paid $10 billion annually to wireless providers like AT&T and smartphone manufacturers like Apple to be the default search engine on their devices in order to maintain its position as the market leader.
DuckDuckGo only has about 2.5% of the market for internet search engines, which the company attributed to its inability to become the default search engine on devices produced by major corporations.
