“Are you going to destroy the company?”
Trump may sway DOJ away from breaking up Google.
A few weeks before the US presidential election, Donald Trump suggested that a breakup of Google’s search business may not be an appropriate remedy to destroy the tech giant’s search monopoly.
“Right now, China is afraid of Google,” Trump said at a Chicago event. If that threat were dismantled, Trump suggested, China could become a greater threat to the US, because the US needs to have “great companies” to compete.
Trump’s comments came about a week after the US Department of Justice proposed remedies in the Google monopoly trial, including mulling a breakup.
“I’m not a fan of Google,” Trump insisted. “They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do, without breaking it up, is make sure it’s more fair.”
Now that Trump is presumed to soon be taking office before the remedies phase of the DOJ’s litigation ends next year, it seems possible that Trump may sway the DOJ away from breaking up Google.
Experts told Reuters that a final ruling isn’t expected until August, giving Trump plenty of time to possibly influence the DOJ’s case. But Trump’s stance on Google has seemed to shift throughout his campaign, so there’s no predicting his position once he takes power.
Business Insider noted that Trump was extremely critical of Google on the campaign trail, vowing to “do something” to curtail Google’s power after accusing the search giant of only highlighting negative stories about him in search results. (Google has repeatedly denied the accusation.) On Truth Social as recently as September, Trump vowed to prosecute Google “at the maximum levels,” seemingly less concerned then about how this could influence competition with China.
It would be unusual for Trump to meddle with the DOJ’s ongoing litigation, antitrust expert George Hay told Business Insider, but then again, “Trump is a bit more of a wild card.”
“It’s very rare that, at the presidential level, there’s any attempt to influence the course of cases which have already been filed. Those have a life of their own,” Hay said. “They depend on the judge, the courts, the lawyers who carry on a case. It’s extraordinarily unusual for the administration to become at all active.”
Trump may still feel some ownership over the DOJ’s investigation into Google’s core business since it began in 2019 under his administration, and tensions between Trump and Google have not diminished much since. The Verge noted that Trump warned Google to “be careful” in August because he “had a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down.” And earlier this year, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, called for Google’s breakup on X (formerly Twitter), proclaiming that a stop to Google’s “monopolistic control of information” was “long overdue.”
Trump’s on-and-off feud with Google
For Trump, disabling Google’s search monopoly might feel personal, as he has spent years accusing Google of manipulating results to disfavor him.
His feud with Google appear to have begun in 2016 when Trump falsely accused Google of manipulating votes, claiming Google wanted to make it appear that he didn’t have a “big victory” over Hillary Clinton, CNN reported.
The feud continued through the 2020 election, Politico reported, with Trump warning Google that his administration was “watching Google very closely” after a former Google employee went on Fox News to claim that Google search results were biased against Trump. Google disputed the employee’s report.
And yet throughout this feud, there have also been times where Trump seems to warm to Google. During his last administration, he backtracked a threat to investigate Google’s alleged work with China’s military, Politico noted, after meeting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Most recently, he claimed Pichai reached out to praise Trump’s ability to trend on the search engine during Trump’s McDonald’s campaign stunt, SF Gate reported.
So far, Google is not commenting on Trump’s comments on the DOJ’s proposed breakup of its search business. But Pichai did send an internal memo to Google staff on the night before the election, The Verge reported, praising them for boosting accurate information during the US election and reminding them that “the outcome will be a major topic of conversation in living rooms and other places around the world.”
At a time when Trump might continue heavily criticizing Google from the Oval Office, Pichai told Googlers that maintaining trust in Google is a top priority.
“Whomever the voters entrust, let’s remember the role we play at work, through the products we build and as a business: to be a trusted source of information to people of every background and belief,” Pichai’s memo said. “We will and must maintain that.”
The DOJ may not even want to seek a breakup
When the DOJ finally proposed a framework for remedies last month, they emphasized that there’s still so much more to consider before landing on final remedies and that the DOJ reserves “the right to add or remove potential proposed remedies.”
That means that while the DOJ has said that requiring a divestment of Chrome or Android isn’t completely off the table, they currently aren’t committed to following through on ordering a breakup.
Through the remedies phase of litigation, the DOJ expects that discovery will reveal more about whether requiring a breakup is needed or if other remedies might resolve antitrust concerns while preserving Google’s search empire.
One reason it might be necessary to spin off Chrome or Android, however, would be to “prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features—including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence—over rivals or new entrants,” the DOJ said.
Google has warned that a breakup could hurt small businesses that depend on open source code Google develops for Android and Chrome. Costs of Android devices could also rise, Google warned.
Adam Epstein—the president and co-CEO of adMarketplace, which bills itself as “the largest consumer search technology company outside of Google and Bing”—told Ars last September that spinning out Android and Chrome may inflict “maximum pain” on Google. But it could also “cause pain to users and publishers and might not be the best way to create competition in search results and advertising.”
Buried in a story from The New York Times is perhaps the biggest clue that Trump may again be warming to Google as he likely heads back to Washington. The Times noted that at the Chicago event, Trump seemed to be echoing a Google talking point.
Google has argued that “a breakup could hurt America’s interests in a heated geopolitical competition with China over dominance in areas like artificial intelligence,” The Times reported. And Trump appeared to be running with that same logic when seemingly shifting his position on wanting to destroy Google in his final days on the campaign trail.
“It’s a very dangerous thing, because we want to have great companies,” Trump said. “We don’t want China to have these companies.”
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
