Worth repeating – I’m not a lawyer. Personally, I believe Judge Mehta and his team are technically competent, conscientious and even brave. Google also wisely withdraws the terms that followed the Exclusive Terms, which grants compliance.
I’m big enough to remember Microsoft and AT&T (“Ma Bell”) antitrust lawsuits, and I sympathize with the difficulties of predicting how any remedies affect the industry and even the U.S. economy. As the court pointed out, it is also difficult to determine that Google’s market dominance is gained through investment and innovation.
The court was particularly subject to mass destruction in searches posing by Genai/LLMS, which could launch new competition. Specifically, they noted that Genai attracted a surge in investment in searches, noting that “the money flowing into that space, and how quickly it arrives is surprising.” I don’t think many of us will argue at this point.
This is what I disagree with. I firmly believe the court missed its own point of view in terms of Google’s monopoly advantage. While competitors like OpenAI will certainly disrupt the search market and actively pursue search capabilities, Google’s infrastructure, indexing and user data still have great advantages. Google remains enviable in machine learning and artificial intelligence talent and pioneers key innovations in the field, including groundbreaking work in Transformers and the self-acting that drives the Genai revolution. Genai competitors have huge obstacles to overcome in the search market and I believe the ruling of Judge Mehta may have suffered from AI hype like most industries.
Ultimately, even at the end of the five-year scale, we cannot expect the industry’s landscape to be rewritten by a ruling. These remedies are serious and I doubt Google will think twice, because the push is too close to another route of antitrust action. Even by Internet industry standards, the next 2-3 years of search and Genai seem unpredictable, but I believe this ruling will be a clear weight transfer balance.
