Samsung ‘appeared’ in the U.S. Department of Justice’s anti-trust trial in the search market against Google.
The mention of Samsung came in the testimony of John Tinter, vice president of Microsoft Business Development, who appeared as a witness at a trial in federal court in Washington, DC on the 28th (local time).
The Ministry of Justice believes that Google illegally maintained monopoly rights by paying billions of won to manufacturers in exchange for setting up a basic search engine for smartphones, limiting the market expansion of competitors such as Microsoft.
Tinter said Microsoft had considered investing billions of dollars to set iPhone basic search as its “bing,” and he also persuaded Samsung Electronics.
Samsung is competing with Apple for first and second place in the global smartphone market.
He said, “Even if (Samsung) cooperated with Microsoft was better in terms of economics, they did not want to leave Google.”
The court released an email from Tinter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on December 15, 2019, regarding Samsung.
In an email, he urged CEO Nadella to stop pushing the then Samsung president to change the default search engine.
He, who described the president as a “DJ” at the time, wrote, “I heard from the Samsung team that the DJ wanted to do something, but they received clear feedback that they didn’t want to make a big move because of the partnership with Google.”
“The DJ was very polite, so I didn’t say ‘no’,” he said.
Samsung knew that Microsoft wanted to set its Bing as Samsung’s basic search engine for smartphones, but it didn’t because of its relationship with Google, just not saying “No.”
Citing Apple’s case, Tinter explained that he has asked Samsung executives for years to allow at least a bid for the basic search engine of Samsung smartphones.
“Although we didn’t beat (Apple to Google), we said Apple made more money and helped Google pay more,” he said. “Samsung executives said, ‘John, it’s not worth it. We don’t want to do that,’ he said.