No. of Recommendations: 3
This reminds me of the MSFT scenario. Ruled their "legacy" business (desktop computing) was a monopoly, just as the market was switching to cloud computing. Search is moving to AI and traditional search is likely to be less of a driving force for the market.
That's pretty much the Justice Department's argument. Entering the brave new world of AI, it sees Google steering users to its own version by making it the default choice on its dominant web browser, mobile platform, etc. Unrestrained, it could also continue to pay companies like Apple and Samsung to make Google the default AI engine on their devices.
“Google’s ability to leverage its monopoly power to feed artificial intelligence features is an emerging barrier to competition and risks further entrenching Google’s dominance,” the government said in its new filing in the case.
One interesting remedy hinted at in the filing is that Google share the underlying data from its search business with competitors. An ongoing byproduct of its current near-monopoly in search, in addition to capturing the lion's share of related ad revenue, is that the data it collects from all those searches keeps widening the knowledge gap between it and other search engines.
Meta has already made its AI engine, Llama, open source. I wonder if Google would consider doing the same with Gemini.
One analyst argued this morning that Google should engage aggressively with the government to shape terms of a possible settlement lest it face the Microsoft outcome -- a long, drawn-out legal battle that distracts it from keeping up with the fast-moving tech world. Microsoft famously missed the move from desktop to mobile during its long battle with Justice.
There is an obvious alternative Google might offer the government: building in choice screens for both browsers and search, where users setting up devices or using web platforms are asked to choose browsers and search engines from a list of available options. That's required now in EU countries under the Digital Markets Act that went into effect in March, so Google is already operating under those rules in one of its major markets.
Early returns suggest it hasn't hurt Google's market share much, at least so far. Google search and the Chrome browser achieved their current dominance by performing better than their competitors. If giving users a choice were enough to fend off U.S. regulators, it might reduce Google's market share by less than one might suppose.
