| Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Wednesday that the Justice Department’s proposed measures to break up what it calls Google’s internet search monopoly could devastate the company’s business model by hampering its ability to invest in new technology. On the stand to defend his company in the biggest federal antitrust trial in a generation, Pichai called the Justice Department’s proposed remedies “extraordinary to read” and said they would leave the $1.95 trillion company’s intellectual property without value. “A combination of all the remedies makes it unviable to invest in [research and development]” as the internet giant has for three decades, he said. Pichai’s testimony came in Week 2 of a federal trial in Washington, in which Judge Amit P. Mehta will decide how to address what he found last year was Google’s illegal monopoly on internet search. Mehta has said he will announce his ruling in the late summer. The Justice Department has proposed a slew of measures, including forcing the company to divest Chrome, the world’s dominant web browser. It has also urged Mehta to order Google to share its search data with rivals and stop paying smartphone companies to feature its search products. Standing at a lectern throughout his hour and a half of testimony, Pichai warned that divesting Chrome would have “many unintended consequences,” including exposing users to cybersecurity risks that his company was best equipped to handle. Pichai, who led the team that built Chrome, said Google has invested “tens of billions of dollars” in the web browser and measures to secure it against frequent attacks. Though Google still dominates internet search, Pichai said it is an underdog in the artificial intelligence race — despite having invested early in the technology. Pichai said there’s still a “big gap” between Google and OpenAI, the maker of market leader ChatGPT, and detailed talks he had with Apple CEO Tim Cook over distributing Google’s Gemini chatbot on iPhones. Apple ultimately went with ChatGPT, in a deal announced in June, but Pichai said he was hopeful Google would reach its own deal with Apple by the “middle of this year.” A Google critic called Pichai’s rhetoric “scaremongering.” “This is exactly the kind of scaremongering you’d expect from Google as they grasp for ways to maintain their illegal search monopoly — and leverage it into AI,” said David Segal, vice president of public policy at Yelp, which filed its own antitrust lawsuit against Google last year. “The remedies trial has already made it clear that there are plenty of companies with the will and capacity to purchase and invest in Chrome,” Segal added. “And from Standard Oil to AT&T to Microsoft, there’s a long history of anti-monopoly enforcement leading to increased investment and invention in the impacted sectors.” The Google remedies trial is the furthest along among a bevy of blockbuster antitrust cases against U.S. tech giants that could result in rulings that would recast the industry. In April, a federal judge in Virginia found that Google was also an illegal monopolist in the online advertising market; the first remedies hearing in that case is set for Friday. The Justice Department also filed an antitrust case against Apple last year, accusing it of monopolizing the market for smartphones. That trial is expected to begin in February of next year. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is at trial in a long-running case aimed at breaking up Meta, and it’s preparing for an antitrust trial against Amazon next year. | 
