| Hi, it's Mark Bergen. News came in over the weekend that the U.S. Justice Department is currently drafting a lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.'s Google for breaking competition law. The draft complaint doesn't necessarily mean the government will sue the company, but the development does mark a turn for the worse in Google's ongoing antitrust saga, a drama that had seemingly sputtered during the pandemic. So now, facing down the looming threat of antitrust enforcement, is the company doing everything it can to telegraph its contrition and good intentions? The answer is—not exactly. Over the weekend, some Gmail users opened their email accounts to find a new widget for Google Meet, the company's video chat app. It mirrors a similar prompt in Google Calendar, which lets users "Add Google Meet video conferencing" to their appointments. For people with the Zoom Video Communications Inc. extension on their Chrome browsers, the prompt sits directly above the option to: "Make it a Zoom Meeting." The net effect is that it looks like the $945 billion-in-market cap search giant is going after the customers of its upstart competitor Zoom. As remote work becomes more prominent, teleconferencing has been one of the few sectors thriving during the pandemic. To capitalize on the trend, first Google made Meet free of charge. Now it's promoting the service furiously. Last week, Meet debuted on YouTube.com, starring in a video ad atop the website. One reading of Google's moves is that it's a part of a long plan to try to package all its G Suite services—which includes Gmail, Calendar and Meet, the newest addition—into one integrated bundle. Both Zoom and Google declined to comment. But Google's tactics are drawing side eyes from the antitrust crowd. From one angle, the Meet blitz looks like what critics would call an old Google strategy—namely, using bigger products to hawk a smaller one at the expense of a leaner rival. The European Union previously fined Google billions for using its search engine, ads machinery and mobile software to favor its own stuff, to the detriment of competitors'. (Google disputes this.) "It's surprising," said Tim Wu, a competition scholar at Columbia University, about Google's recent Meet promotions. It's the kind of tactic that "certainly attracts interest from enforcement regulators." Google's longstanding foes are less surprised. "Any nascent marketplace where Google sees it can use its dominant products, it exploits that," said Luther Lowe, a senior vice president at Yelp Inc. "It's just getting more and more brazen." Anticompetitive or not, at times it can seem like Google is shooting itself in the foot. On Twitter, people complained about Google Meet buttons showing up in invitations for calls already scheduled on Zoom. "That sounds like they're creating a very bad consumer experience," said Randal Picker, a University of Chicago law professor. "I don't understand why they're doing that." So far, the U.S. antitrust case against Google appears to be focused on digital advertising. There, Google is the runaway leader, in contrast to video-conferencing and messaging where it's still an also-ran. Not only is it fighting Zoom, but competitors like Microsoft Corp., Slack Technologies Inc. and Facebook Inc. also have their own offerings. How effective will Google's video push be? So far, the company hasn't marketed Meet with its biggest platform, search. And even if it does, that doesn't guarantee success. In 2011, Google.com once linked to Will.i.am's Google Plus page in a promotion for the fledgling social network. Nine years later, Google Plus is dead and Will.i.am., the artist, is fielding calls at home over Zoom. —Mark Bergen | 
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