Breaking Up Google? So Much for a Whole-of-Government Approach to US AI Leadership

“Whole-of-government” has become a popular buzzword during the Biden administration. For example, the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) set forward a “coordinated Federal Government-wide approach” to “governing the development and use of AI safely and responsibly” and allow the “United States to lead in this moment for the sake of our security, economy, and society.” But the administration’s emphasis on a whole-of-government approach to driving U.S. innovation in AI seems to be forgotten when it comes to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) desire to break up Google as reflected in its proposed remedy framework for the search case.

A key part of the Biden administration’s AI strategy is ensuring that the U.S. maintains global techno-economic leadership in AI. The administration’s recent Memorandum on Advancing the United States’ Leadership in Artificial Intelligence made clear that “[c]eding the United States’ technological edge would not only greatly harm American national security…[and] undermine United States foreign policy objectives and erode safety, human rights, and democratic norms worldwide,” but also that “[t]he United States Government cannot take the unmatched vibrancy and innovativeness of the United States AI ecosystem for granted.”

On that score, the Biden administration has it exactly right. As one of us recently opined, the reason that the United States is leading in AI is not because it has a state-directed innovation system that pours billions of dollars of subsidies into its favored firms, like China. Rather, the U.S. relies on Schumpeterian scale-driven dynamic competition from its leading technology companies, including Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google, who together spend colossal amounts on research and development. As Schumpeter explained long ago, it is this scale and scope that often gives firms the best incentives and abilities to engage in high-risk ventures that, if successful, bring about enormous consumer benefits, as they did in the digital revolution.

At least at one level, these facts are not lost on the Biden Administration when it comes to the U.S. winning the artificial intelligence revolution like it did the digital. As National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated in recent remarks at the National Defense University, firms like Google are at the forefront of AI innovation and technological progress:

Google DeepMind showed that AI can predict the structure of a protein without any wet lab work. By 2022, four years later, that same team released predictive structures for almost every protein known to science, hundreds of millions in all. Just a few weeks ago, the scientist involved won a Nobel Prize.

Sullivan also emphasized that this level of private sector-driven innovation is not a law of nature, but rather that “[o]ur innovation base and our private sector are the envy of the world because they take risks” and that “we need to nurture a national comfort with, to paraphrase FDR, bold and persistent experimentation.” And yet, as he points out, it remains an open question whether the U.S. will “sustain the political will here at home to make the investments in our own national strength that will be required of us in the years ahead” to not “needlessly give up America’s position of economic and technological leadership because we can no longer generate the political consensus to invest in ourselves.”

The Biden administration needs to look in the mirror. While it champions the need for private sector-led innovation to drive U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence, the Biden administration’s Justice Department wants to put one of its top innovators—Google—on the chopping block. Following District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta’s highly problematic ruling alleging that Google monopolized search, the DOJ earlier this month put forward a remedies proposal that would consider breaking up Google. In particular, this would force Google to divest Chrome, Android, or both to address its faux concerns about anticompetitive behavior, which has nothing to do with Google using Android or Chrome to benefit its position in search (or vice versa).

One doesn’t need to go far back in history to understand why breaking up Google would be a huge blow to American innovation and leadership in AI. Before its breakup by the Justice Department in 1984, AT&T, through Bell Labs and its equipment arm Western Electric, was the global leader in innovation, using its scale and size to support massive research and development efforts. But thanks to an ideologically driven crusade against the company by the DOJ—not at all dissimilar from the modus operandi of today’s neo-Brandeisians regarding “Big Tech”—the company was broken up. Ultimately, Bell Labs and Western Electric disappeared, allowing foreign competitors like Ericsson, Nortel, and Nokia to assume their global leadership roles.

In the words of the famous essayist Georges Santayana, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. When it comes to breaking up Google amidst the AI revolution and foreign competition from China, the stakes are arguably much higher than with AT&T in the 1980s. As ITIF recently reported, China is nipping at the heels of the U.S. in key advanced technologies and showing no signs of letting up. While the Chinese Communist Party is subsidizing its leading tech firms, the Biden administration appears to be talking out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand, the administration is praising Google as a leader in AI innovation. On the other, it is using the DOJ to push for a punitive and wholly unnecessary breakup of the company. At bottom, it is long past time for the Biden administration to prioritize a real whole-of-government approach to AI leadership that is uncontaminated by the flawed ideologies of the neo-Brandeisian radicals at the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission.