A year ago, Google faced the prospect of being dismantled. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and a new court judgment has helped it avoid this fate. Part of the reason is that AI poses a grave threat to Google's advertising revenues. "Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment," according to the decision.
The verdict has felt anti-climactic for media and ad execs who had hoped for sweeping change, especially given the court had already ruled Google's search dominance a monopoly last August. Publishing execs hoped the remedies would separate Google's search engine crawler from its AI experiments - such as AI Overviews and AI Mode - or at least force them to provide more data on how those products are impacting publisher clickthroughs from search. That would've given publishers more control over where their content is showing up, and what it's used for.
Lawyers for Trump and Google's YouTube recently told a federal judge they "continue to engage in productive discussions regarding next steps" in a lawsuit Trump filed over YouTube's decision to ban Trump's account in the wake of the January 6th riot at the US Capitol. The lawyers expect "additional discussions ... in the near future." Trump also sued then-Facebook and Twitter over their bans, and Meta recently paid $25 million to settle theirs.
Anthropic is launching a research preview of a browser-based AI agent powered by its Claude AI models, the company announced on Tuesday. The agent, Claude for Chrome, is rolling out to a group of 1000 subscribers on Anthropic's Max plan, which costs between $100 and $200 per month. The company is also opening a waitlist for other interested users. By adding an extension to Chrome, select users can now chat with Claude in a sidecar window that maintains context of everything happening on their browser. Users can also give the Claude agent permission to take actions in their browser and complete some tasks on their behalf.
The witnesses include a mix of representatives from companies harmed by Google's monopolistic practices. There will be publishers, SSPs and ad servers speaking at the trial, along with The Trade Desk, Google's main buy-side rival.