From afar, it looks like Google had a rough year. It was found guilty of operating an illegal search monopoly and a publisher ad tech monopoly, not to mention getting hit with a raft of civil antitrust suits brought by ad tech But zoom in a bit and it becomes clear that the past year went about as well as Google could have hoped for.
"The great patron of the internet for the last 27 years was Google. The great villain of the internet today is also Google," Prince said. He claimed that in the past, for every two pages that Google crawled to inform its search engine, it would, on average, send one visitor to those sites-traffic that publishers can monetise with advertising.
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.
