English soccer's Premier League also sued Google for copyright infringement in May.

    Mr.Schmidt alluded to Viacom's high-profile $2.4 billion antitrust suit against Time Warner in 1989. That suit claimed Time Warner's HBO pay cable movies service attempted to put Viacom's rival service Showtime out of business by intimidating cable operators and Hollywood studios to give preferential treatment to HBO.

    The suit was ultimately settled out of court by 1992. As part of the settlement, Time Warner paid $75 million and agreed to purchase a cable system owned by Viacom for an above market price, as well as agreed to distribute Showtime more broadly on the Time Warner cable television system.

    The two companies eventually agreed to merge their rival comedy cable networks to form Comedy Central, now home to popular shows hosted by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

    Separately, Mr.Schmidt said the surge in popularity of Internet social networks such as News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook would ultimately be positive for Google.

    Google, whose mainsource of revenue comes from selling advertising based on text keyword searches, relies on its catalog of documents from the Web, its so called index.

    But sites such as Facebook, whose members and third-party companies have rapidly created new content for Facebook, prevent the indexing of their pages.

    Schmidt said the closing off of social networks was a "transient" phase and that these companies will eventually see the value of open borders.

    Google shares rose $4.67, or 1.2 percent, to $550.83 on the Nasdaq.