Alphabet Inc.'s Google will begin to make its Chromebook laptops in India through a partnership forged with HP Inc. The move makes Mountain View, California-based Google the latest among global technology companies to expand assembly in the key growth market. Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai announced the partnership Monday on X, formerly known as Twitter. The move will help Google compete more effectively with Windows computers from companies such as Dell Technologies Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc. It's also another win for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's $2 billion incentive plan to have tech giants make India their production base.
Google’s Search Defaults Prey on Power of Habit, Witness Says
16.09.2023 - 01:33 / tech.hindustantimes.com
Antonio Rangel, a behavioral economist and professor at the California Institute of Technology, knows how to get you to grab a cereal box off a supermarket shelf using product placement and consumer habits. And he said Google understands the same tricks, which is why the tech giant has fought so hard to keep itself as the default search engine on mobile phones.
“If I can move your eyes, if I can manipulate your fixations, I can manipulate your choices quite a bit,” Rangel said as an expert witness called by the US government in its landmark antitrust trial against Alphabet Inc.'s Google.
Rangel said in testimony Wednesday and Thursday that his research on the prime placement of cereal boxes in stores was relevant to his assessment of search engine defaults. He found that getting prominent real estate on a web browser or mobile phone discourages people from switching to rival search engines. Consumers are reluctant to change behaviors that have hardened into habit, he said.
“Search engine defaults generate a sizable and robust bias towards the default,” Rangel said. “Defaults have a powerful impact on consumer decisions.” Often consumers don't even realize they are making a choice by default and they don't know how to change it, he said.
Rangel's testimony addresses a key point in the government's biggest tech monopoly trial of the last two decades, which opened Tuesday in Washington. The US Justice Department alleges that Google illegally maintains a monopoly in online search by paying more than $10 billion a year to tech rivals, smartphone makers and wireless providers in exchange for being set as the preselected option, or default, on mobile phones and web browsers. Google argues the company has won market share because it has the best search engine, not because of a lack of competition.
The trial, which is expected to last 10 weeks, could have broad implications for the $1.7 trillion company, which has remade communications and information retrieval in the modern internet era. The Justice Department is seeking to establish, in this trial phase, that Google violated the law; if District Judge Amit Mehta rules that it did, he might seek a second proceeding that would include options for remedy. The government could push for the biggest forced breakup of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in 1984, unwinding Google Search from its other businesses, like Maps or its Android operating software.
Rangel testified that Google showed, through its actions, that it believed in the power of default settings. Google employs a Behavioral Economics Team, which conducted experiments on the company's products to see how it would affect the behavior of people using them, he said.
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