Google’s Chief Speaks Out Against Breakup Proposal
Judge Amit P. MEHTA of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that Google had violated the law in order to maintain its search monopoly. He convened an hearing this month to decide the remedies that would be put into place to address the illegal conduct. Mr. Pichai, as the company’s second witnesses, was called to make his case that the court shouldn’t use the aggressive solutions of the government, such as forcing Google to share data with its rivals and sell its popular Chrome browser. Mr. Pichai said the government’s proposal would lead the company to make fewer investments in new technology if it needed to share the benefits with its competitors for a minimal fee.
“The combination of all the remedies, I think, makes it unviable to invest in the R&D the way we have for the past three decades, to continue to innovate and build Google search,” he said, referring to research and development.
Mr. Pichai will be the most prominent witness at the landmark hearing that could rebalance power dynamics in Silicon Valley. The Google search case is the first major test for American government efforts to limit tech giants’ immense power over commerce, communication and information online. A federal judge in Virginia ruled this month that Google was also a monopolist in some online advertising technology.
The Federal Trade Commission is squaring off with Meta in a trial over whether its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp illegally snuffed out nascent competitors. Additional federal antitrust lawsuits against Apple and Amazon are expected to go to trial in the coming years.
The Justice Department filed its Google search lawsuit in 2020, during President Trump’s first term.
Government lawyers argued during a 2023 trial that Google had locked out other search engines by paying companies like Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to be the search engine that comes up automatically in web browsers and on smartphones. According to testimony from the time, the company paid $26.3 Billion as part of these deals in 2021. Judge Mehta ruled in August against the company. The Justice Department’s proposal has a wide range. The government claims that Google must sell Chrome as it automatically sends queries to its search engine. Mr. Pichai, who helped to develop Chrome, bristled when a government lawyer questioned whether he could predict how a future owner of the browser would handle cybersecurity.
“Given my deep knowledge of the space and a general understanding of what other companies’ capabilities and commitments are around web security, I do think I’m able to speak on it,” he said.
The government also wants Google to share its search results with rivals. Other search engines could access data about Google users’ searches and websites they clicked on under the proposal. Pichai called the forced data sharing required by the proposal “de facto divestiture” of the company’s intellectual property that would “allow anyone to completely reverse engineer, end to end, every aspect of our technology stack.”
Google’s proposal is more narrow. It said that it should continue to be able to pay other companies to use its search engine in order to get prime positioning. But it also said that some of those deals should be up for renegotiation every year, and that smartphone manufacturers should have more freedom when deciding what Google apps to install on their devices.
Judge Mehta asked Mr. Pichai how other search engines could compete with Google if the company was still able to pay for its own search product to get prime placement.
Mr. Pichai added, “I can’t think of any exceptions to the ‘best product wins out’ rule.”
