Google says DOJ’s proposal for breakup would harm U.S. in ‘global race with China’

As Google heads back to the courtroom on Monday, the company is arguing that the US needs it in its full form to take on chief adversary China and uphold national security in the process. The remedies trial in Washington, D.C., follows a judge's ruling in August that Google has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago.

The Justice Department has called for Google to divest its Chrome browser unit and open its search data to rivals. However, Google said in a blog post on Monday that such a move is not in the best interest of the country as the global battle for supremacy in artificial intelligence rapidly intensifies. In the first paragraph of the post, Google named China's DeepSeek as an emerging AI competitor.

Google believes that the DOJ's proposal would "hamstring how we develop AI, and have a government-appointed committee regulate the design and development of our products," Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, wrote in the post. "That would hold back American innovation at a critical juncture. We're in a fiercely competitive global race with China for the next generation of technology leadership, and Google is at the forefront of American companies making scientific and technological breakthroughs."

Google is one of a number of US tech companies trying to fend off the Trump administration's antitrust pursuits, most of which is held over from the Biden administration. Google lost a separate antitrust case last week, when a federal judge ruled that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets due to its position between ad buyers and sellers. Meta is currently in court against the Federal Trade Commission, which has alleged that the company monopolizes the social networking market and shouldn't have been able to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. Amazon also faces an FTC lawsuit for allegedly maintaining an illegal monopoly. And beyond antitrust, Trump's FTC on Monday sued Uber, accusing the ride-hailing company of deceptive billing and cancellation practices tied to its subscription service.