Summary

  • Google faces an anti-monopoly investigation in China.
  • China hasn’t shared much information about the investigation.
  • The investigation into Google may be linked to US-China trade tensions.

Google’s no stranger to accusations of monopolizing markets. Over the past couple of years, the company’s found itself on the business end of legal action alleging that it abuses its market position in advertising in the EU, and search in the US as well as in Japan, just to name a few. Now, as reported by the Associated Press and Android Headlines, Google’s allegedly run afoul of China’s anti-monopoly laws.

Judging by a translated version of a statement posted on China’s State Administration for Market Regulation website, the Chinese government has begun investigating Google for allegedly violating Chinese law. There’s not currently any more information available — China’s statement on the matter is all of three sentences long. It’s not clear what China’s charges are referring to — as the Associated Press points out, Google’s consumer online services aren’t officially available within the country.

AP further notes that China’s “announcement came minutes after the new US tariffs came into effect.” These new tariffs, imposed by the Trump administration, add a fee of 10 percent of the purchase price of any goods imported by the US from China, owed by the US-based importer to the US Treasury. In effect, the tariffs could either force Chinese manufacturers to cut costs in order to maintain consistent sales to US firms that will now face greater import fees, or blunt US demand for China-produced products by increasing the retail price of those goods, making alternatives produced in other countries (or domestically) a comparatively better value.

Ultimately, such tariffs will likely lead to China exporting fewer goods to the United States, which, given the US imported more than $400 billion in Chinese goods in 2024, could be a significant blow to the Chinese economy. China hasn’t explicitly said whether its nascent investigation into Google is retaliatory in nature, but the country has imposed 15% tariffs on coal and liquefied natural gas imports from the United States.

We don’t know how this will go

A close up on a prompt to install the Epic Games store via sideload on a Pixel 9 Pro.

With little information to go on and the investigation only just announced, we don’t know what, if anything, this will mean for Google. AP writes that the probe “is likely to center around Google’s Android operating system for smartphones and used as a bargaining chip in the US-China trade war.”

Elsewhere in Google monopoly news, the company is seeking this week to overturn a California court’s ruling in favor of Epic Games that would force numerous changes to the Play Store, citing “legal errors” that worked in Epic’s favor.