The prominent seating of tech titans, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, at President Donald Trump‘s inauguration drew lots of notice. A fourth attendee at the Jan. 20 event, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, spurred less attention but provided a major clue about the Trump administration‘s legal and regulatory approach to Big Tech, an on-again, off-again rhetorical target of the president.
Amazon founder Bezos and Meta honcho Zuckerberg, who were once Trump critics, symbolize a much friendlier billionaire-class approach in Trump’s second term. Musk, the world’s richest person, is, of course, part of the Trump administration, as he leads its Department of Government Efficiency.
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Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google for nearly a decade, keeps a much lower public profile. And his presence at Trump’s inauguration could be seen as a shrewd business to stay on the president’s good side amidst regulatory threats to the company he leads.
Still, during the first two months-plus of Trump’s second term, it’s become clear that his administration isn’t ready to make nice with so-called Big Tech just yet. The Department of Justice recently issued a recommendation for tough remedies against Google in a long-running search engine monopoly case. It’s a move reminiscent of the regulatory regime under former President Joe Biden, usually a Trump political foil.
Trump DOJ officials mostly affirmed the penalties sought from the Biden administration in a case last year where Google was found guilty of illegally monopolizing the online search market. Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that Google’s payments to Apple of approximately $10 billion a year to make Google’s search engine the default in the Safari browser violated U.S. competition laws. The case was originally brought in the waning days of the first Trump administration in 2020.
Google plans to appeal the initial monopoly ruling no matter what the court orders on remedies. But Biden’s DOJ shocked many legal onlookers in November 2024 when it asked the court for remedies far beyond the substance of the case. That included forced Google divestiture of its Chrome browser.
These types of “structural” remedies are far more severe than the expected “behavioral” remedy of prohibiting the contracts found to be illegal. Those hoping for a return to traditional, conservative antitrust enforcement with the change of administration were shocked again when the current DOJ left the Biden requests mostly intact.
Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics, told the Reason Foundation that the “new proposal shows that the DOJ under President Donald Trump intends to continue the highly politicized approach to Big Tech antitrust.”
One important change from the new DOJ is the removal of requested bans on Google’s investment in artificial intelligence. The Trump administration has been vocal about its prioritization of the United States beating China in the global race for artificial intelligence dominance. Achieving that goal became more uncertain and urgent with the recent global stardom of China’s DeepSeek AI model. Vice President JD Vance told a Paris AI summit in February that “this administration will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide” and warned of regulatory overreach that could slow innovation.
On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump even warned of a Google breakup advantaging China. He told an audience, “What you can do without breaking it up is make it more fair,” while decrying that the company’s search results were skewed against him.
The moves and statement came amid a backdrop of leading tech companies making some policy changes that reflect a more Trump-friendly direction, such as Meta’s discontinuation of fact-checking services in favor of platform X-style community notes and its rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, commonly known as DEI.
But so far, in Google’s case, Trump’s executive agencies haven’t reversed course in the policy war against Big Tech. The DOJ’s retaining of requested remedies is just the latest example of staying on course pursued by the Biden administration. The Federal Trade Commission, an agency that shares antitrust enforcement duties with the DOJ, opted to leave intact strict Biden-era merger guidelines.
The FTC also opened a public comment period requesting information from members of the public who experienced deplatforming or had their posts removed on social media platforms, suggesting that such practices “may have been the product of anticompetitive conduct.” At the Federal Communications Commission, newly installed Chairman Brendan Carr has voiced support for the agency taking steps to limit Section 230, the liability shield integral to many tech company’s business models.
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But perhaps the tech industry shouldn’t be too surprised. Shortly after being sworn in for his second term, Trump reacted to criticisms from the Left that tech billionaires would have too much influence in his new administration. He assured reporters that there would be no quid pro quo, saying, “They’re not going to get anything from me.”
Trump added at the time, “I don’t need money, but I do want the nation to do well, and they’re smart people, and they create a lot of jobs.”