"A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a shake-up of Google's search engine in an attempt to curb the corrosive power of an illegal monopoly while rebuffing the U.S. government's attempt to break up the company and impose other restraints."
""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," Mehta wrote. The judge is trying to rein in Google by prohibiting some of the tactics the company deployed to drive traffic to its search engine and other services."
"The handcuffs being slapped on Google will preclude contracts that give its search engine, Gemini AI app, Play Store for Android and virtual assistant an exclusive position on smartphone, personal computers and other devices. But Mehta stopped short of banning the multi-billion dollar deals that Google has been making for years to lock in its search engine as the default on smartphones, personal computers and other"
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta issued a 226-page decision imposing behavioral and data-access remedies on Google to address unlawful monopolistic conduct while declining to order a breakup. The ruling targets contractual tactics that grant Google's search, Gemini AI app, Play Store and virtual assistant exclusive placement on phones, personal computers and other devices and mandates opening closely held search databases. The remedies were shaped by rapid advances in artificial intelligence and emerging competitors such as conversational answer engines. The decision responds to a nearly five-year DOJ antitrust case initiated under the Trump administration and continued under Biden, but stops short of banning longstanding multi-billion-dollar default search agreements.
Read at ABC7 Los Angeles
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]