Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you as I finish the audiobook version of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I can’t say I found compelling.
In tech – artificial intelligence is having its day in court with an 11th-hour appearance in Google’s landmark antitrust trial and Anthropic’s major settlement with book authors.
Why OpenAI helped Google skirt a Chrome sale
Google dodged a catastrophic breakup, and it has its biggest competitor to thank for that, according to the judge who could have forced the tech giant to sell off Chrome, the most popular web browser in the world, and perhaps Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system.
Amit Mehta, who ruled in 2024 that Google had built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the internet search business, said last week that he would not force the most drastic remedy on the tech giant. The US government had requested that Mehta enjoin Google to divest Chrome. Instead, the company is prohibited from entering into exclusive distribution agreements for its search engine – but not barred from distribution agreements entirely – and must share data from its search business with competitors. Google is expected to appeal, but for now, one can imagine Sundar Pichai breathing a sigh of relief.
Critics said the penalties were weak, nothing more than a “slap on the wrist”, a phrase that appeared at least half a dozen times in the statements that flooded my inbox after the ruling came down.
The reason for the relative tameness of the penalty is the emergence of real competition to Google – what the case concerned in the first place. United States v Google may have focused on search, but its aftermath concerned generative artificial intelligence.
“The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case,” Mehta wrote. “These remedies proceedings thus have been as much about promoting competition among general search engines as ensuring that Google’s dominance in search does not carry over into the generative AI space.”
Mehta said that in a prior era, internet search attracted neither investment nor innovation, so great was the fear of and dominance exerted by Google. That is no longer the case. Generative AI companies are attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in investment to create new products that threaten the primacy of internet search. It is no secret which company Mehta is referring to: he namechecks OpenAI and ChatGPT 30 times each in his ruling.
“These companies already are in a better position, both financially and technologically, to compete with Google than any traditional search company has been in decades,” Mehta wrote. “These new realities give the court hope that Google will not simply outbid competitors for distribution if superior products emerge. It also weighs in favor of ‘caution’ before disadvantaging Google in this highly competitive space.”
Google has been Safari’s default search option since…
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