SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – The co-founders of Google are stepping down as executives of its parent company, Alphabet, ending a remarkable two decades during which Larry Page and Sergey Brin shaped a startup born in a Silicon Valley garage into one of the largest, most powerful – and, increasingly, most feared – companies in the world.
Sundar Pichai, who has been leading Google as CEO for more than four years, will take on additional duties as Alphabet’s CEO, the position held by Page. The company isn’t filling Brin’s position as president.
Page and Brin started Google soon after they met as Stanford University graduate students in 1995.
What began as a way to catalog the growing internet has now become one of the most influential companies in the world. Google dominates online search and digital advertising and makes the world’s most widely used operating system for smartphones, Android. It’s hard to make it through a whole day without using one of Google’s services – ranging from online tools to email, cloud computing systems, phones and smart speaker hardware.
In this May 7, 2019 file photo, Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks during the keynote address of the Google I/O conference in Mountain View, Calif. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down from their roles within the parent company, Alphabet. Pichai will stay in his role and also become CEO of Alphabet. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)Yet Google has been facing pressure from privacy advocates over its collection and use of personal information to target advertising. It also faces allegations that it abuses its dominance in search and online advertising to push out rivals.