The judge gave Google a win on the basis that AI would be a competitive threat to its search engine.
Google investors were overjoyed on Wednesday in response to a long-awaited decision in a high-profile federal antitrust case against Google.
On Tuesday, federal judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google could get to keep its Chrome browser, despite a previous ruling also by Mehta declaring that the tech giant’s search business was a monopoly.
In response, Google stock had its largest upside non-earnings-related overnight gap up since it was added to the S&P 500 in 2008, according to Bespoke Investment Group.
Instead of divesting, the court is asking Google to share search index and user data with its competitors and refrain from exclusive contracts (though with carve outs that allow some exclusive contracts.How is this a win for Google?
The major reason behind this decision that’s being largely considered a win for Google was supposedly the advent of AI.
“The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case,” Judge Mehta said in the ruling.
“For the first time in over a decade, there is a genuine prospect that a product could emerge that will present a meaningful challenge to Google’s market dominance,” the court ruled.
The court said that “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.”
Based on the many witnesses that painted generative AI as a budding competitive threat to Google search business, the court decided that “market forces” would decide the future of Google’s search engine market dominance.
How that is supposed to play out we will see in the coming years, but the testimony given by top executives from Google and Apple at the trial could show a roadmap of how the tech industry is thinking about it.Google’s search monopoly
Last year, Judge Mehta declared that Google holds a monopoly in online search and search-tied advertising. On Tuesday afternoon, the judge decided on remedies to this ruling that would open the search engine space up for competition.
Some expected that the judge would rule Google to divest from Chrome, a decision that would have been the most obvious way to combat a monopoly.
