A decisive court ruling branding Alphabet Inc.’s Google an illegal monopolist in the search market is set to carry consequences for the development of the artificial intelligence (AI) space and the tech giant’s position in it. Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia noted that Google, through exclusive deals with Apple Inc. and others to be the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers, stifled competition for search services. In his August 5 ruling, Judge Mehta stated that the scale of user data that Google obtained through these practices remains a critical input for producing quality search results.
This ruling opens the door to remedies that could ultimately cut into Google’s scale. User data is a key component in training machine learning models, said Jason Kint, CEO of media trade group Digital Content Next. “The remedy stage will have implications for the AI market going forward,” Kint explained.
Judge Mehta has set a hearing for September 6 to discuss potential remedies, which may include blocking Google’s exclusivity contracts and separating Alphabet’s Google search business from other products. Google has announced plans to appeal the ruling. “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” Kent Walker, president of Google Global Affairs, said in a statement.
DOJ’s action against Google is its largest tech antitrust case since the 1990s case against Microsoft Corp. DOI called as a witness Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella who raised concerns about Google’s power in online search giving it an advantage in generative AI development. Nadella cited the potential for Google to pay publishers for exclusive content to enhance its search AI, making it superior to rivals. Google today receives nine times more web queries each day than all its competitors combined, and 19 times more searches on mobile. Judge Mehta dismissed Google’s claims that the role of scale is overstated, citing the ongoing reliance on large volumes of user data.
Should Judge Mehta determine that Google’s access to search data presents an unfair advantage in AI technology development, he could require the company to share these datasets with competitors. Legal professionals and antitrust authorities will undoubtedly follow these developments closely, recognizing the broader implications for the AI and tech markets.
The case is United States v. Google LLC, D.D.C., No. 1:20-cv-03010.