By Jan Wolfe

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai on Wednesday urged a judge to reject the "extraordinary" measures proposed by the Justice Department to curtail its dominance in online search.

"It is so far-reaching, so extraordinary," Pichai said of the government's proposal to force a sale of Google's Chrome browser and require that Google provide user data like search histories with rivals.

The testimony came during a trial before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, who ruled last year that Google has an illegal monopoly over online search. The judge is now hearing arguments and testimony over what remedy he should impose to restore competition.

Pichai was the first witness called by Google's lawyers in the proceeding, known as a remedies trial, which began last week. Mehta has said he plans to rule by August.

Pichai told the court that the Justice Department's data-sharing proposal in particular would allow rivals to reverse engineer Google's search engine, which the company has made a focus of its research and development.

"It would be trivial to reverse engineer and effectively build Google search from the outside," he said.

"It's not clear to me how we would have any value to our IP" if the proposal is adopted, Pichai said. "It makes it unviable to invest in R&D the way we have for the last two decades on Google Search."

Pichai said the Justice Department's proposal would also jeopardize the privacy of Google's users.

"People search in Google in their most vulnerable moments, and there seems to be no privacy protections," Pichai said of the Justice Department's proposal. The government has disputed that argument in court filings, saying data-sharing would happen "with proper privacy safeguards in place."

The Justice Department brought the search case in October 2020, during the final months of President Trump's first term. At the time, it was seen as the most significant tech antitrust case since the Justice Department's years-long fight with Microsoft in the 1990s.

Google facilitates about 90% of all online searches, giving it an unrivaled view into the internet browsing behavior of billions of people. Its search engine supports an advertising business that brought in about $200 billion last year.

The Justice Department also has a separate antitrust case focused on Google's products used to broker and place digital advertising on websites. A federal judge in Virginia ruled earlier this month that Google unlawfully monopolized that market as well, and will hold a remedies trial later this year.

The Justice Department alleges Google's dominant position in search is the result of anticompetitive agreements that block rivals from gaining market share.

A focus of the case has been the search giant's contract with Apple that makes it the default search engine on Apple's Safari web browser. Google paid Apple $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default, according to evidence presented by the Justice Department in the proceedings.

Google has said it will appeal Mehta's decision that it has an illegal monopoly in search, but must first wait until the conclusion of the remedies hearing. It also plans to appeal the digital ad tech ruling.

Google has long maintained that it competes fairly, saying consumers flock to its search engine because it is the best on the market.

Pichai sought to bolster that theme on Wednesday, testifying that it faces fierce competition because of the rise of chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Pichai called ChatGPT the "market leader" in the market for generative artificial intelligence, and said Google's competing product Gemini is trying to make up ground.

Write to Jan Wolfe at jan.wolfe@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 30, 2025 12:45 ET (16:45 GMT)

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