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Artificial intelligence and the antitrust case against Google

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Federal prosecutors say Google uses anticompetitive business practices as well as artificial intelligence, data, and scale to maintain monopolies.
Following the launch of investigations last year, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) together with attorney generals from 11 U.S. states filed a lawsuit against Google on Tuesday alleging that the company maintains monopolies in online search and advertising, and violates laws prohibiting anticompetitive business practices. It’s the first antitrust lawsuit federal prosecutors filed against a tech company since the Department of Justice brought charges against Microsoft in the 1990s. “Back then, Google claimed Microsoft’s practices were anticompetitive, and yet, now, Google deploys the same playbook to sustain its own monopolies,” the complaint reads. “For the sake of American consumers, advertisers, and all companies now reliant on the internet economy, the time has come to stop Google’s anticompetitive conduct and restore competition.” Attorneys general from no Democratic states joined the suit. State attorneys general — Democrats and Republicans alike — plan to continue on with their own investigations, signaling that more charges or backing from states might be on the way. Both the antitrust investigation completed by a congressional subcommittee earlier this month and the new DOJ lawsuit advocate breaking up tech companies as a potential solution. The 64-page complaint characterizes Google as a “monopoly gatekeeper for the internet” and spells out the reasoning behind the lawsuit in detail, documenting the company’s beginning at Stanford University in the 1990s alongside deals made in the past decade with companies like Apple and Samsung to maintain Google’s dominance. Also key to Google’s power and plans for the future is access to personal data and artificial intelligence. In this story, we take a look at the myriad of ways in which artificial intelligence plays a role in the antitrust case against Google. The best place to begin when examining the role AI plays in Google’s antitrust case is online search, which is powered by algorithms and automated web crawlers that scour web pages for information. Personalized search results made possible by the collection of personal data started in 2009, and today Google can search for images, videos, and even songs that people hum. Google dominates the $40 billion online search industry, and that dominance acts like a self-reinforcing cycle: More data leads to more training data for algorithms, defense against competition, and more effective advertising. “General search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising require complex algorithms that are constantly learning which organic results and ads best respond to user queries; the volume, variety, and velocity of data accelerates the automated learning of search and search advertising algorithms,” the complaint reads. “The additional data from scale allows improved automated learning for algorithms to deliver more relevant results, particularly on ‘fresh’ queries (queries seeking recent information), location-based queries (queries asking about something in the searcher’s vicinity), and ‘long-tail’ queries (queries used infrequently).

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