On Friday, a federal court in Washington implied that he will give ruling related to Google monopoly. He said Alphabet’s Google will be ordered by him to adopt less drastic steps to reestablish competition in online search rather than the 10-year plan that antitrust authorities had advised.
On Friday, closing arguments were submitted to US District Judge Amit Mehta in a trial about strategies to correct Google’s unlawful monopoly of Google in online search as well as related advertising.
Referencing recent events like the acquisition of a device startup by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, he said:
“Ten years may seem like a short period, but in this space, a lot can change in weeks,”Â
In order to make Google the default search engine on new devices, the DOJ and a group of states want Google to stop paying Apple and other smartphone manufacturers billions of dollars and share search data.
During the hearing, the judge hinted at the potential of restricting data sharing and stopping payments only in the event that other measures fail to boost competition.
Additionally, he struggled with the emergence of artificial intelligence technologies that have the potential to displace conventional search engines.
According to the court, it is unlikely that current competing search engines like DuckDuckGo or Bing would be used as an additional default search engine in Apple’s Safari browser.
In reference to previous versions of Google’s search engine, he stated:
“If anything it’s going to be one of these AI companies that can do more than just search. And why? Because maybe people don’t want 10 blue links anymore,”Â
The stock price of Google has already shaken due to the result of the case’s disclosure of Apple’s plans to offer AI-based search options.
The trial started in April, and Mehta has announced that he plans to make a decision by August.
The way Google’s search monopoly provides it an edge in AI products like Gemini and vice versa worries antitrust authorities.
In his testimony, Nick Turley, the product head for ChatGPT at OpenAI, stated that the company is still years away from reaching its objective of using its own search engine to respond to 80% of searches and that access to Google search data would enable it to concentrate on making ChatGPT better.
Turley said that if Google is compelled to sell Chrome, OpenAI would be interested in purchasing it.
However, since the case was about search engine competitors, Mehta questioned whether firms like OpenAI or Perplexity should be regarded as Google rivals that would be granted access to any data Google is obligated to divulge.
Adam Severt was told by the judge that:
“It seems to me you now want to kind of bring this other technology into the definition of general search engine markets that I am not sure quite fits,”
Severt retorted that although the case’s initial phase concentrated on the past, the remedies needed to be proactive.
Trevor Wagener gave a statement:
“The academics conclude that many of the proposed remedies warrant significant reconsideration to better balance the goals of competition, innovation, & consumer welfare—and to safeguard US leadership in the technology sector”.
At the hearing, Google lawyer John Schmidtlein stated that although generative AI is changing the way search appears, Google has allayed worries about AI competition by ceasing to enter into exclusive contracts with telecom providers and smartphone manufacturers, such as Samsung Electronics, allowing them to install competing search and AI apps on new devices.
Schmidtlein claimed that allowing successful AI firms like OpenAI to have access to the technology that Google has spent two decades perfecting would be wrong.
Schmidtlein additionally said that:
“Coming to Google and asking Google for a handout when they are the market leader seems completely disproportionate to what this case is about,”
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