Google’s monopoly isn’t going anywhere. On Tuesday, federal judge Amit P. Mehta made a ruling in the landmark antitrust case first launched by the Biden administration, and it’s safe to assume there’s some parties being planned in Google’s HQ right now. The company will have to pass off some of its data and search results to rival engines, but it won’t be forced to sell its Chrome browser, which was one of the harsher punishments on the table. Or, as Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO of rival company DuckDuckGo put it (per The New York Times), “It’s a nothingburger.”
In addition to the ruling that Google must share some of its data with “qualified competitors,” Mehta also put some restrictions on payments that the company has been making to ensure its search engine remains the prime suggestion on smart phones and other web browsers. Still, he did not ban those payments entirely. “Notwithstanding this power, courts must approach the task of crafting remedies with a healthy dose of humility,” the judge said. “This court has done so.”
Like so many other facets of this country right now, the emergence of generative AI seems to have indelibly shifted the direction of this case. NYT describes the push to break up Google as the “most significant attempt to level the tech playing field since an antitrust ruling against Microsoft more than 20 years ago.” At the same time, AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic have also been worming their way in. Those companies have built chatbots that users have begun to turn to for the same sort of information as Google, which now has its own AI division and has begun appending AI summaries at the top of its search results. It also recently launched an “AI mode” in which users can chat with a bot about their query instead of doing the trawling themselves.
In his ruling, Mehta wrote that AI “changed the course of this case.” “The money flowing into this space, and how quickly it has arrived, is astonishing,” he continued. “These new realities give the court hope that Google will not simply outbid competitors for distribution if superior products emerge.” He also noted that “unlike the typical case where the court’s job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts, here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future… Not exactly a judge’s forte.”
