Facing an anti-trust probe from the US government, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has cautioned against those who may want to regulate the tech giants “for the sake of regulating.”
In an interview with CNN Business, Pichai said his company had gone through similar situations in Europe, so the probe wasn’t a surprise for them. “For some of the other companies, maybe the scrutiny is newer,” Pichai said on Friday.
“Scrutiny is right, and we will participate constructively in these discussions,” he said and added: “I worry that if you regulate for the sake of regulating it, it has a lot of unintended consequences.”
According to media reports, the US Department of Justice is preparing to open a case against Google for potential anti-trust violations. The news comes amid the debate on whether large technology companies like Facebook should be broken up — something that’s also becoming a major talking point for some of the politicians leading up to the US elections next year.
Google, for its part, is actually no stranger to being scrutnized by governmental authorities; the company has seen a number of anti-trust complaints and has also been claimed to have a monopoly on things like search, among others. In an anti-trust complaint from the European Commission regarding ranking of shopping search results and ads in 2010, Google was fined $2.7 billion in 2017.
