The Chinese government announced on Tuesday that they are investigating Google in response to the 10 percent rates imposed by US President Donald Trump on Chinese imports. Minutes after the rates came into effect, China’s state administration for market regulation said it had investigated the US technical giant to violate the country’s anti-monopoly law.
The Chinese government may have chosen strategically to go to Google because it has limited operations in the country, ensuring that the hit for the US technical giant would be relatively minimal. The move gives China enough room to escalate as the Trump administration announces further rates or other trade measures. Google declined to comment.
China also announced that it puts more restrictions on the sale of critical minerals such as tungsten and additional rates on farm equipment, bakkies, liquid natural gas, coal and other goods from the US. Although the US does not depend on China on all the minerals affected, the country does control the majority of the world’s tungsten supply, which is used in light bulbs, semiconductors and ammunition.
‘China’s position is firm and consistent. Trade and tariff wars have no winners, ”the Foreign Ministry of China said in a statement on Sunday shortly after the rates were announced. “This move cannot solve US problems at home, and, more importantly, not benefit one of the two, even less the world.”
China has kept Google in its cross chairs over the past few years during the ongoing trade war with the US. According to Reuters, in 2020, the government was considering opening an antitrust investigation into Google’s Android business. The deliberations follow a complaint from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which was targeted by Trump during his first term.
Due to US sanctions, Huawei cannot use US software such as Google Mobile Services, a series of tools used widely in the smartphone industry. The restrictions forced the business to develop its own operating system called Harmony OS.
But most smartphones around the world are still running on Android, which has created competition investigations in a number of countries, some of which have led to franchise changes designed to give consumers and app developers more choices and lower fees. In China, several smartphone manufacturers still rely on an Open Source version of Android.
This past December, Chinese authorities also opened an anti-monopoly investigation into Nvidia, the chipmaker whose GPUs played an important role in the development of generative AI and an important source of US and China trade-in-law. The announcement came shortly after Biden Administration further sharpened China’s access to high semiconductors.
About 15 years ago, Google stopped offering a search experience for China to a series of Chinese cyber attacks linked by the government, against IT and other US businesses. Google debated about seven years ago to re -enter China with a search engine, but the project was posted to protests from some employees concerned about supporting Chinese supervision and censorship.
Google has also stopped selling the cloud technologies in China directly, as local laws can threaten the privacy and security insurance it offers to customers in other markets. Other Google services such as YouTube are blocked by Chinese internet regulators.
China has allowed domestic companies to buy ads by Google so that they can market to customers abroad. But revenue from these transactions is relatively small, and China did not even find a mention in parent company Alphabet’s financial report last year. This is in contrast to Meta, which contains China among its largest markets in terms of the location of the advertiser and said last year that China advertisers make up 10 percent of its annual revenue.