00:00 Speaker A
So Google, listen, bottom line, avoids a breakup bill, not forced to sell off Chrome, not required to divest Android. Investors cheer this decision, Bill. I saw analysts saying today this was the best case scenario for Google, but I’m interested Bill to get your response and your reaction. Do you believe this was the best remedy for this case?
00:27 Bill
It was a cautious remedy from a really smart, careful, thoughtful judge. Um, I I think his decision not to order a breakup is is probably defensible. But whether he did enough to do what his job was, which is to restore competition that was lost because Google got itself to a 90% market share of search without by eliminating its competitors by restricting competition. Is this remedy the question is enough to allow for competitive search going forward? That’s the fundamental question.
01:21 Speaker A
Bill, I also want to ask you a question that has been raised. I mentioned to get your thoughts about this, is whether the government with this case, taken on Google here, was just kind of fighting last year’s story. The idea being that search, Google’s bread and butter, it is fundamentally changing. That Gen AI models are importantly and dramatically affecting this market, affecting this industry.
01:50 Speaker A
I thought it was interesting the judge did right here, the emergence of Gen Gen AI changed the course of this case. I mean, was was Bill in your opinion the government just waging kind of an old battle here?
02:03 Bill
I don’t think it was waging no battle, but the judge is right to say, but we got to be both looking at the bad conduct that got Google unlawfully to its 90% share, but figure out what’s going to happen going forward given AI. Now, the judge decided that he wanted to err on the side of caution because we can’t predict. He said I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen with AI. But one concern here is that Google, uh, by having its own AI product and having his relationships uh, with the hardware manufacturers and others may be in a position to extend its dominance in search into making its artificial intelligence tool the predominant tool there. And that’s where I think critics are legitimately concerned about whether this remedy is too cautious.
03:22 Speaker A
Why I meant to ask you, but listen, put your old hat on. If you had been trying this case, Bill, if you’ve been prosecuting this on behalf of of Uncle Sam. I I’m just curious how you would be feeling today. Would you be feeling like, yes, this was a good use of my time and energy and focus or would you be feeling disappointed?
03:51 Bill
Probably a little bit of both. There is no doubt in my mind that this was a worthy case to bring. Uh and uh would I feel somewhat shorted in terms of the remedy given how strong uh the judge Judge Ma uh found that there was anti competitive monopolization behavior that helped elevate Google to its 90% market share. Yeah, and you know, the Justice Department, Gail Slater, the head of the Nrust division has said they’re going to look carefully at whether or not to uh uh to contest these uh these remedies on appeal. You know, there there are meaningful remedies in here, sharing a lot of its user data, um, uh sharing uh its ad ad tech, uh uh uh availabilities with with competitors, potentially gives some ability to other search engines uh to get a foothold in this market that they’ve been denied up and up until now. So it’s really from the point of view of the Justice Department, it’s a worthy case to bring bad behavior always needs to be prosecuted. The question is whether the remedy is going to adequately protect against bad behavior in the future and adequately remedy the bad behavior that brought about the case in the first place.
