#google-antitrust

#google-antitrust

For Google antagonists and ad tech competitors who want the Department of Justice to get its wish list of remedies, the vibe shift in the case is ... not good. The DOJ may have bitten off more than it can chew in calling for a prolonged divestiture process (its own proposal features a timeline that stretches 14 years), and court watchers felt Judge Brinkema was skeptical of removing a free, easy solution, if a replacement includes any costs or engineering know-how to switch.

A court order will require Google to scale back some of its more aggressive tactics to get its search engine in front of as many users as possible, but it's still fighting to make sure new restrictions won't limit its AI expansion. At a hearing in a federal courthouse in DC on Wednesday, Google attorney John Schmidtlein told Judge Amit Mehta that he should not prevent the company from bundling its Gemini AI app with other Google apps like YouTube and Maps, Bloomberg reported.

Ready, a former president of Google's Payment and Commerce group, is against any Google ad tech divestiture. Also, at Pinterest, Ready built more bridges to Google. He signed strategic deals to increase Google's targeting into Pinterest supply. Oh, and Google's search rankings update last year suddenly defaulted more recipe search traffic to Pinterest . Ready argues that a Google divestiture is risky, since the repercussions cannot be forecasted. Nor can the judge know how Google's supply-side tech might be used by a potential acquirer.

The rise of ChatGPT and Perplexity is already starting to chip away at Google's search dominance. Through agentic AI and conversational search, these new browsers promise more personalization and a redefined search experience. Whether they'll truly pull users away from traditional search is still unclear - but brands can't wait to protect visibility. From what we know, both Perplexity's and OpenAI's browsers will focus on personalization, context-aware answers, and agentic AI to deliver more intuitive search experiences.

The EC found Google guilty of exercising a monopoly and fined the company 3 billion Euros ($3.5 billion). It's a deliberately eye-popping fine and the third such decision against Google at the hands of the commission. Google has 60 days to propose a plan to end its self-preferential practices to the EC. But there's an unbridgeable gap. While outwardly bold, the statement leaves plenty of room for equivocation - "at this stage" and "it appears" are clear hedges.

This week: Tesla offered Elon Musk an incentive package worth a trillion dollars. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck discuss Tesla's motivation and why Musk, already the richest man in the world, would be tempted by the outrageous number. Then, the big antitrust case against Google went out with a whimper, with the judge ruling that they are a monopoly but they don't need to break up the company if they follow a few new rules. The hosts discuss the logic behind the decision

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.

"To date, they're just not good enough," Cue said, adding that Apple has already had discussions with Perplexity, OpenAI, and Anthropic.