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Former President Donald J. Trump, whose administration sued Google over allegations it violated antitrust law, indicated that he might not break up the company if he regained the presidency, describing it as a bulwark against China’s technology ambitions.
“China is afraid of Google,” Mr. Trump said while speaking on Tuesday at an event with Bloomberg News during a meeting of the Economic Club of Chicago. He questioned whether a corporate split might “destroy the company,” though he added that he was not a fan of Google.
“What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it’s more fair,” Mr. Trump said.
The remarks signaled a different approach from the former president on antitrust action against Google, which makes the world’s most popular search engine. Just last month, Mr. Trump said he would prosecute Google for showing “bad stories” about him.
A federal judge issued a landmark ruling in August that the company illegally maintained a monopoly in search. The Justice Department said last week that it was considering making an argument to that judge that Google should be broken up as a punishment.
Google declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s remarks. It has argued that a breakup could hurt America’s interests in a heated geopolitical competition with China over dominance in areas like artificial intelligence, a point that Mr. Trump echoed on Tuesday.
“It’s a very dangerous thing, because we want to have great companies,” he said. “We don’t want China to have these companies.”
The Justice Department’s antitrust investigation into Google started under Mr. Trump in 2019. In 2020, weeks before the presidential election, the agency sued the company, arguing that it had illegally maintained a monopoly in the online search business by paying companies like Apple and Samsung to be the automatic search engine on smartphones and web browsers.
While Mr. Trump did not specify how he would approach the thorny question of what to do with Google, he said that the company’s search engine was “rigged” because it presented only negative stories about him and that he needed do “something.”
“I called the head of Google the other day and I said, ‘I’m getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find them in Google,’” he said. “‘I think it’s a whole rigged deal. I think Google is rigged just like our government is rigged all over the place.’”
Mr. Trump spoke to Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation who was not authorized to discuss it.
Mr. Pichai told Mr. Trump that “you’re the No. 1 person on all of Google for stories,” Mr. Trump recalled on Tuesday.
“Most of them are bad stories,” he said, “but these are minor details, right?”
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