Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai on Wednesday blasted the U.S. Justice Department’s proposed remedies in its landmark search-monopoly case, calling the demand that Google share its entire search index and ranking data with competitors “far-reaching” and “extraordinary.” Forced data disclosure at “marginal cost,” he testified, would let rivals “reverse-engineer, end-to-end, any part of our technology stack” and make it “not clear … how to fund all the innovation we do.”

What the government wants

After Judge Amit Mehta ruled last August that Google illegally maintained a search monopoly, the DOJ and 14 states drafted a menu of remedies, including:

  • Compulsory licensing of Google’s search index, algorithms and data to other engines.
  • Divestiture of the Chrome browser within five years if competition fails to materialise.
  • A possible future order to spin off Android should default-search payments and data-sharing prove insufficient.

Prosecutors insist such measures are necessary to unwind what they call a “vicious cycle” of defaults, data and advertising cash that shuts out challengers. Google counters that the list reads like “a wish-list for competitors,” noting it spent $49 billion on Search and AI last year alone.

Pichai’s defence

Under friendly questioning, Pichai framed Google as an innovation engine whose investments—more than 90 percent of commits to the Chromium codebase and over $1 billion a year on Chrome—would dry up if the court forces a sale or open-source giveaway. He warned that opening the index could also compromise user safety and privacy by exposing spam-fighting systems.

The bigger antitrust dragnet

The search-trial remedies phase overlaps with a separate Virginia case in which Judge Leonie Brinkema has already found Google dominates digital-ad technology and set a May 2 hearing to explore structural fixes that could include spinning off parts of its ad stack.

What happens next

  • Closing briefs are due May 30; Mehta is expected to rule on remedies later this summer.
  • Google has signalled it will appeal any order to divest or license core assets.
  • Rivals OpenAI, Perplexity and Yahoo are slated to testify for the government on how access to Google’s data could reshape competition in generative AI and search.

Antitrust scholars say the case could rival the AT&T and Standard Oil break-ups in scope. For now, it pits Washington’s most aggressive trust-buster agenda in decades against a company arguing that dismantling its ecosystem would “kill Google Search” and, by extension, hobble American innovation.