Open Letter to Google’s Sundar Pichai and Team

This essay is the first project produced by ARI’s Atlas Circle initiative. The Atlas Circle “exists to empower business leaders who recognize that it’s time to stop appeasing and apologizing for their work and their success, and who refuse to cede the ideological battlefield to their attackers.”

January 28, 2025

Dear producers at Google,

For years, you have been a prime target of antitrust persecution. Both private companies and government agencies have sought to strip you of your right to run your business as you see fit, whether it’s internet searching, advertising, or an app store. This has culminated, so far, in the Department of Justice asking the court to forcibly take parts of your business away from you.

Your chief legal officer, Kent Walker, has rightly called out the DOJ’s “radical interventionist agenda” of breaking up Google. “We wish we were making this up,” Walker said, recognizing the devastating nature of DOJ proposals to force Google to sell Chrome or impose a technical committee to micromanage Google’s technologies.¹,² These would destroy the spectacular achievement that Google is.

Walker is right to be alarmed, yet the DOJ’s demands are more than legal overreach. It is vital that you, and every other productive American, realize that you are victims of a profound injustice. Like IBM, Microsoft, and many other successful companies before Google, you are being subjected to a witch hunt.

Antitrust enforcers accuse you of exercising “monopoly power,” a deliberately vague and undefined notion. The only rational meaning of “monopoly power” is when a government grants to business, say an airline, the exclusive privilege to operate in the country, sealing the business from competition by legally prohibiting other companies from entering the field. Obviously, Google has been granted no such privilege.

To fend off the accusations that you wield some undefined “monopoly power,” you laid out a mountain of evidence demonstrating that you have earned and continue to earn your success, even in the face of immediate and constant competitive pressure.³ You discussed the “emergence of other search competitors,” explaining that your market share is not due to the lack of rivals.⁴ You argued that even when your ad auction prices are higher than those of competitors, they “yield the best ROI [return on investment],” which your customers willingly pay for. You showcased how you “repeatedly outcompeted [your] rivals . . . on the basis of . . . superior quality and monetization,” and your superior “business acumen,” like anticipating increased demand in mobile search and investing in it early. And you showed how users go above and beyond to switch back to Google when it is not the default search engine, proving their voluntary commitment to your products.

You hoped that laying out the facts of your competitive business environment and your foresight within it, of which the above is only a small sample, would disarm your attackers. Yet they are undeterred. Do you know why?

All the facts in the world that demonstrate your virtues—your long-range planning, your innovation, your calculated risk-taking, your enormous productivity—will not fend off the antitrust attacks, but attract them. In his opinion damning Google as a monopoly, Judge Mehta basically admitted so: “Google is not wrong. It has long been the best search engine. . . . But these largely undisputed facts are not inconsistent with possessing and exercising monopoly power.”⁵ Even when you proved that your exclusive agreements to have Google preloaded as the default search engine on smartphones and browsers are a legitimate, voluntary business practice, you were denied equality before the law: “[I]n the hands of a smaller market participant it might be considered harmless, or even honestly industrial,” the judge said, referencing a prior court decision. But in the hands of a large, successful firm like yours, it suddenly isn’t.

It is not any misconduct that put you on the antitrust “most wanted” list. The court readily acknowledged that your success rests on, as your VP of Regulatory Affairs summarized, “building the best search engine and making smart investment and business decisions,” the result of which is that “people don’t use Google because they have to—they use it because they want to.”⁶

It might be hard to wrap your head around this reality, but antitrust victimizes you precisely because of your ability, productivity, and success.

The antitrust system gives its enforcers this power through vaguely written, undefinable, inherently non-objective laws, which Ayn Rand aptly called the “rule of unreason.”⁷ Charge high prices? Get accused of monopoly pricing. Charge low prices? Get squashed for predatory pricing (like Microsoft, persecuted for giving a browser away for free). Match competitors’ prices? “Collusion!” In your case, the issue of exclusive agreements should make clear the arbitrariness of the law: such deals are perfectly legal, unless antitrust enforcers decide that, if Google employs them, they are not.

The most violent criminals know, or at least can know, objectively and clearly, when they are violating the law. You, on the other hand, produce life-furthering values on a global scale, but have to live in fear, unable to know if or when antitrust enforcers will descend upon you, declaring your business practices illegal.

Such persecution has no place in America, the only country in history built on the fundamental recognition of the individual’s right to live, produce, and trade in freedom, under the rule of law. Americans used their freedom to innovate and build unprecedented wealth. The more some excelled, however, the more some responded not with gratitude but with animosity. Increasingly, as Rand observed, instead of being left free and protected, producers are “at the mercy of the whim, the favor, or the malice of any publicity-seeking politician, any scheming statist, any envious mediocrity who might chance to work his way into a bureaucratic job and who feels a yen to do some trust-busting.”⁸

Standard Oil was broken up for succeeding in selling the cheapest oil in the world and thus acquiring more than 90% of the market. Microsoft was dragged through hellish courts for succeeding in building a dominant software ecosystem and products like Office that became industry standards. As countless others who have faced the antitrust inquisition for their achievements, you have become the target for standing at the pinnacle of online search and advertising.

Though antitrust inquisitors might claim to pursue goals like “promoting competition” or “protecting consumers,” that can’t be their driving motive. If it were, they wouldn’t ignore every piece of evidence of your competitors continuing to strategize and devise new products, always ready to step in should you fail to satisfy your customers and partners, whose voluntary choice of your products is the only thing that keeps you at the top. Whether it’s to take your wealth, technology, know-how, and serve it on a silver platter to envious competitors, or simply to drag you down just because they can, destroying you is their driving concern.

Whether they admit it or not, the antitrust inquisitors punish the able for exercising their ability, the successful for achieving their success. Next time they announce that they stand for fairness in competition, remember that “fairness” for them means tying your arms behind your back while distributing the fruits of your work to your rivals.

What can you do in response? We are not lawyers and have no legal advice to offer you. But if, in the court of public opinion, you and others in your shoes defend yourselves in moral terms, you can help expose the antitrust laws for the evil that they are and help to relegate them, eventually, to the trash bin of history. Let everybody know that the antitrust system is inherently corrupt, that the case against you is profoundly unjust, and that you are proud of your business achievements, which call for moral admiration and celebration, not persecution. For our part, if Ayn Rand has taught us anything, she has taught us to value productive achievements and the individuals whose moral virtues fuel those achievements. The Department of Justice is supposed to represent the people. In persecuting you for your achievements, it does not speak for any of us at the Ayn Rand Institute. It is in the interest of every productive American publicly to proclaim the same. If enough of us do so, we can help end this injustice.

Onkar Ghate, Ph.D., Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow
Robertas Bakula, Graduate Center Associate
Elan Journo, Vice President of Content and Senior Fellow
Tal Tsfany, President and CEO

1. Kent Walker, “DOJ’s staggering proposal would hurt consumers and America’s global technological leadership,” The Keyboard, (November 21, 2024).
2. Dave Michaels, and Miles Kruppa, “Google Should Be Forced to Sell Chrome Browser, Justice Department Says,” Wall Street Journal(November 21, 2024).
3. Suzanne Vranica and Kruppa Miles, “Google’s Grip on Search Slips as TikTok and AI Startup Mount Challenge,” Wall Street Journal (October 5, 2024).
4. US v. Google. Judge Mehta ruling (August 5, 2024).
5. US v. Google.
6. Lee-Anne Mulholland, “Our remedies-proposal-dec-2024/,” The Keyword (December 2024).
7. Ayn Rand, “Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason,” Objectivist Newsletter (February 1962).
8. Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967, Centennial edition).