Google is my favorite giant tech company.

Unlike Apple, it has preserved a broadly innovative spirit, pursuing lots of ideas that have no direct link to its existing revenue model. Unlike Microsoft, it understands people well enough to give them consistently comfortable interfaces, and it keeps the interfaces pretty glitch-free. And unlike Facebook, it has never treated users, literally, like laboratory rats.

So when I fire up my Android phone or open my Google search page, I’m feeling pretty good about it.

Still, Google must be stopped.

The race to dominate the personal AI space—to build the artificial intelligence that each of us will use as an all-purpose digital assistant—is closer to being over than most people realize. And Google is poised to win. And if ever there was a business that we can’t let any one company dominate, it’s AI. Using the government’s antitrust powers in new ways to stave off monopoly, and preserve a healthy oligopoly, is the only way to keep humankind from buying a one-way ticket to the Matrix.

OK, slight exaggeration. I’m personally skeptical of the standard AI nightmare scenarios, including the one where an increasingly smart and helpful automated servant informs us one morning that the roles have been reversed. Still, our reliance on AI is growing, and I don’t see why it would stop growing anywhere short of complete and utter dependence.

Even during the next few years, when digital assistants will barely qualify as intelligent, they’ll shape more and more of a person’s information flow, subtly influencing shopping, lifestyle choices, even political views. And these assistants will know more and more about us, compiling deeply revealing databases that sit on the server of some company that may or may not keep them safe from hackers, that may or may not resist government nosiness.

There’s no single fix for these and other such concerns, but the least we can do is make sure people have the option of choosing from among several AI providers. Companies that compete for our business are more likely to address our concerns—to guard our data closely, to be transparent about the algorithms that guide us, to give us the option of trading off convenience for privacy, and to avoid various kinds of dubious backroom behavior that, if exposed, would help their rivals. I don’t know exactly what forms of creepiness AI will bring as it evolves, but I’d like the option of choosing less creepy over more.

Today the key arena of competition for eventual AI dominance is the voice assistant—Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana.

At first glance, the race seems wide open. Of the two main portals for voice assistants—the smartphone and the home smart speaker—Amazon leads in one; unless industry estimates are way off, it has sold more Echoes (Alexa’s smart speaker) than Google has sold Google Homes or than Apple has sold HomePods. But when you turn to smartphones it’s Apple and Google that have big footprints.

And Microsoft—well, actually, if Microsoft had any empathy for digital life forms, Cortana would have been put out of her misery years ago (cc: Samsung re Bixby). But that still leaves three viable players, right?

Not very viable, for a couple of reasons.

First, Google is the only company with a sizable foothold in both the smartphone and the smart speaker. Apple’s recent, much-delayed unveiling of its HomePod inspired near unanimity among reviewers: The speaker is great but the AI part isn’t; Siri in the living room is significantly worse than Siri on an iPhone, which is famously worse than Google Assistant on an Android phone. Plus, for now—and now is what matters in a race to dominate an emerging platform—Apple’s HomePod is less friendly to third-party developers than Google Home or Amazon’s Echo.

Second, the value of a personal AI depends partly on how much it knows about you, and Google has more kinds of data about more people than either Apple or Amazon. The pre-eminence of Google Maps—the go-to map app even on many iPhones—is by itself massively consequential when it comes to building an AI that makes your life easier. To say nothing of the information gathered via Gmail, Google search, YouTube, etc.

Sure, Apple has some cards to play, notably brand loyalty so strong as to keep many users from peering beyond its walled garden. Still, the garden isn’t as big as you might think. Worldwide, fewer than 20 percent of smartphones sold are iPhones, and just about all the rest—more than 80 percent—run Android.