Pichai will now oversee Alphabet's forward-looking lines of business, which also include drones and life sciences. He will continue to manage Google's highly lucrative online search and digital advertising businesses, along with its divisions working on maps, smart devices, the online video service YouTube and the Android mobile operating system.

“If the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost,” Brin and Page wrote. “While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents — offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!”

The leadership transition comes at a precarious moment for Google. The company is fending off antitrust investigations from both the Justice Department and a coalition of attorneys general representing nearly every state in the country. Congress has also taken the company and its Silicon Valley brethren to task for their policies for moderating online speech and handling the personal data of their users.

As a result, Pichai has become a greater presence in Washington in the last year. In March, he convened with military officials at the Pentagon and with President Donald Trump at the White House amid sharp criticism over Google's decision to pursue work in China while simultaneously withdrawing from a Defense Department artificial intelligence program.

Trump and fellow Republicans have also claimed Google and other Silicon Valley firms suppress conservative views online. Most recently, Republicans accused Google of targeting conservatives with a new policy that prevents political advertisers from targeting their messages to very narrow audiences.

Google and other companies have denied that users’ political views shape their content moderation and advertising policies. Their rules apply across the political spectrum, the companies insist.

Pichai made his first appearance before Congress last December during a tense House Judiciary Committee hearing at which he fielded a broad range of questions on political bias, election interference and Google's business ties to China, among other topics. Three months earlier, he and Page had angered leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee by declining to attend a hearing on online disinformation, which instead featured an empty chair labeled "Google."

Indeed, Page and Brin have shied away from Washington before, notes John Simpson, the retired director of the privacy and technology project at Consumer Watchdog. A search of C-SPAN's expansive video archive, for instance, turned up no official appearances in Washington.

Even before Pichai took the reins at Google, other company executives would respond to Washington's occasional call. They included Eric Schmidt, whom Brin and Page tapped to serve as CEO for nearly a decade starting in 2001. Though Page later retook the helm as CEO, Schmidt remained executive chairman and a public face of the company until 2017.

“We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company,” their letter says. “And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a president.”

A Google spokesperson declined to comment beyond the letter.

Page and Brin were students at Stanford University in 1996 when they created a class project that would become Google’s search engine, which represented a huge leap forward in the notoriously difficult task of scouring the sprawling Web for content that users cared about. The company later used its domination of the search business, and its command of the world’s data, to become the leading player in the global digital advertising market, where its closest rival is Facebook.

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But Google’s unofficial slogan of “Don't be evil,” and its practice of offering most of its services to consumers for free, haven’t kept it from drawing the ire of lawmakers, regulators and rivals in the U.S. and Europe. And in the face of unprecedented scrutiny, the company continues hoovering up vast troves of users’ data through ventures such as its recently announced $2.1 billion purchase of the fitness-device company Fitbit.

Just last month, the Department of Health and Human Services’ civil rights office opened an investigation into a partnership with the health system Ascension that, according to The Wall Street Journal, gave Google access to tens of millions of patient records without their express permission.

European regulators, meanwhile, have imposed a combined $9.2 billion in fines on Google in the past decade after saying the company had unfairly favored its search, mobile software and online advertising services over those of rivals. But Google still dominates those markets, and the fines were tiny compared with the company’s global revenue, which totaled $136 billion last year.

Some of the company's most ardent critics, including the online review site Yelp, seized on the CEO change as another opportunity to swipe at what they view as unchecked power at the utmost ranks of Silicon Valley's major technology companies.

"Nothing in the Page/Brin announcement says anything about a divestiture or relinquishing of the voting control," tweeted Luther Lowe, the senior vice president of policy at Yelp, which has repeatedly complained about Google's treatment of rivals. "The fact remains: Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the most powerful and least accountable humans on the planet."

Others in the industry offered a more favorable take on what the pair might do next. "How about Page/Brin 2020?" tweeted Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

