A year ago a Federal District Court held that Google broke antitrust laws by using illegal means to maintain a monopoly over online search. This week the court is widely expected to decide what it wants to do about it.
The court has a menu of options. Will it break up Google (by ordering it to sell the Chrome browser or even Android)? Make it share valuable data with its rivals? All of the above?
The specific outcome obviously matters for Google and its operations. But the remedy’s truer significance is how it will shape the future of artificial intelligence — specifically, how wide it opens the door for a new generation of smaller companies, perhaps even those outside Silicon Valley, to compete in the A.I. age.
On its face, the Google case was about the company’s side payments (which in 2021 totaled more than $26 billion) to Apple, Samsung and other companies — payments that the court found were in exchange for preserving Google’s monopoly over search. But search was already a mature market; the bigger stakes and larger target of the case have always been the broader ecosystem of information retrieval, which is destined to be shaped by newer technologies like chatbots and A.I.
In that respect, the trial — even before the verdict and remedy — has already changed the industry. Over the past few years, Google has been operating with the proverbial policeman at the elbow, aware that it was being closely watched. Google’s chatbot Gemini is a capable product, plausibly a substitute for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Left to its own devices, Google would have surely sought to give billions of dollars to big companies like Apple to make Gemini its featured product, as it did with its search engine. It would have also surely sought to pressure and pay smaller companies to do the same.
But with law enforcement watching, Google has been hampered in its practice of using large amounts of money to win major A.I. deals. As the antitrust reporter Leah Nylen has noted, Apple executives describe having a different mind-set in a world without payments from Google — a mind-set that led Apple to choose ChatGPT, not Gemini, for the iPhone’s A.I.-assisted search. Similarly, officials at Perplexity, an A.I. start-up, have spoken of a similar mind-set of openness since Google has been under pressure.
At the very least, the court’s remedy will formalize this informal arrangement, putting an explicit limit on Google’s ability to use its money to foreclose competition. But the court may well go further — and the further it goes, the more it could shake up the industry and create opportunities for smaller and perhaps more innovative companies.
Say the court orders Google to sell Chrome. (Perplexity has preemptively bid $34.5 billion for it.) Chrome is the world’s dominant browser, with about 67 percent of the global market, and Google uses it to steer people to both Google Search and Gemini, while collecting valuable user data along the way. A Chrome browser that didn’t favor Google would transform the market for A.I. and search.
The court might also order Google to freely license its click and query data. That data — users’ search queries and their clicks on search results — is the high-octane fuel of our A.I. age. Access to this data could supercharge Google’s rivals, especially smaller companies that have had less data to train on.
Whatever remedy the court issues, there will be a simple measure of its effectiveness: namely, whether people who work at big companies like Google start quitting their jobs to start new companies. The 1956 antitrust agreement between AT&T and the Justice Department, which limited AT&T to the telecommunications industry, helped spawn America’s semiconductor industry as people fled Bell System to start new companies. The antitrust action taken against Microsoft in the 1990s paved the way for today’s internet platforms.
Today’s tech sector, to a degree not always appreciated, is in the midst of a slow-moving succession drama. The central question is whether the dominant platforms, especially Google, can hold onto their power in the A.I. age. It would be a mistake to assess this or any other antitrust remedy too narrowly. Like the felling of a large tree in an old forest, the question is what it does for the ecosystem — or more precisely, what grows out of it.
Tim Wu (@superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia, a contributing Opinion writer and the author of the forthcoming book “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.” He served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy from 2021 to 2023.
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