If investors in Alphabet Inc. weren’t all that worried at first about the possible consequences of Google losing its search antitrust case, they perhaps should be now.
After a district court’s ruling in August that Google is an illegal monopoly, the Justice Department has made it clear it feels handicapping the company’s future competitive advantage in artificial intelligence would be one effective way to fix the damage — making Google’s already monumental task of keeping up with AI rivals even more difficult.
That’s my main takeaway from the government’s latest filing, made public on Tuesday, that for the first time goes into detail on the ideas regulators are considering as possible remedies for Google’s behavior.
And that’s all they really are at this point: ideas. They will be fleshed out in future filings and will face multiple rounds of rulings and appeals before being enforced. Google said in a statement that the Justice Department’s proposals would go “well beyond the legal scope of the Court’s decision.”
The filing suggests several of the fixes that had been speculated by antitrust experts, such as nixing Google’s ability to enter into exclusive contracts to make Google the default search engine on various platforms. The government may also call for the judge to force Google to spin out top products as separate companies — specifically, its Chrome browser, which uses Google Search by default, and the Android mobile operating system, which similarly favors Google’s own products like Search, Maps and Gmail.
On this, at least, I’m inclined to agree with Google’s protestations. It argues that spinning out Android in particular would be bad for consumers, leading to price increases for devices, particularly more affordable smartphones, that now use Android for free. An independent Android, separated from Google’s engineering prowess and resources, would find it far more difficult to maintain feature parity and competitiveness with Apple’s iOS.
More interesting, then, is what the Justice Department thinks can be done to loosen Google’s grip on search and its future competitiveness in AI. Remedying Google’s monopoly “requires not only ending Google’s control of distribution today but also ensuring Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow,” the filing stated.
First, the Justice Department is considering asking the judge to force Google to give rivals some access to the company’s secret search sauce by sharing “the indexes, data, feeds, and models used for Google search, including those used in AI-assisted search features.” Anticipating Google’s complaint that this would put personal user data at risk, the government says that if that’s the case, Google shouldn’t collect that data in the first place. The rule would be that anything that can’t be shared can’t be collected.
This remedy alone would be enough to blow a significant hole in what has been Google’s competitive advantage ever since the days it was run out of a Silicon Valley garage: Complex search ranking algorithms, underpinned by unparalleled data insights on user habits.
But it wouldn’t stop there. Like some industry observers, the Justice Department clearly believes AI has the potential to unseat traditional web search as the way people find and use information on the internet, so another potential remedy looks at hobbling Google’s ability to use it’s market-leading position in search to gain an upper hand in AI.
“Google’s ability to leverage its monopoly power to feed artificial intelligence features is an emerging barrier to competition and risks further entrenching Google’s dominance,” the filing warned. Regulators have heeded the complaints of many companies, particularly publishers, that say they have been strong-armed into feeding Google’s AI since opting out would also mean being excluded from Google’s search results — a death sentence for businesses that rely on search traffic.
The Justice Department says forcing Google to "allow websites crawled for Google search to opt out of training or appearing in any Google-owned artificial-intelligence product” would level the playing field. Options for publishers would include being able to opt out of products like Google’s controversial AI Overviews feature that takes information from third-party websites and synthesizes it into text appearing at the top of web searches, potentially removing the incentive to visit the actual websites.
Google has described the government’s potential remedies as “radical,” accusing antitrust regulators of “pursuing a sweeping agenda” that will come with unintended consequences. The competitive battlegrounds on AI are yet to be drawn, the company argues, making the Justice Departmnet’s thumbing of the scales unreasonable and dangerous. During the likely yearslong appeals process, the courts will need to determine whether the proposed fixes, as Google claims, “risks holding back American innovation” — or whether it will just be Google that gets held back, after years of illegally holding back its competitors.
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