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Google can thank OpenAI for its big win in court.
After a federal judge ruled that Google wouldn’t be forced to sell its Chrome browser — avoiding the harshest potential remedies in a landmark antitrust case — shares of the search giant surged by almost double digits.
What a relief for Google and its investors: They’ve been weighed down by the uncertainty of the pending decision for months. And now the company can move forward after prevailing over antitrust prosecutors set on reigning in Big Tech’s power.
But the court’s ruling placed Google’s strange relationship with generative AI on full display, highlighting what amounts to a double-edged sword for the company amid the new tech.
Popular AI-powered chatbots, which perform like more intuitive, capable, and far-reaching search engines, are threatening to displace Google’s legacy search experience. They pose significant and unwelcome competition in a way that Bing has simply not.
But perhaps not entirely unwelcome. The competition’s dramatic arrival meant two things: billions of dollars flowing into their operations and a legal lifeline for Google, providing a defense against monopoly accusations.
The judge, Amit P. Mehta, did not mince words, writing, “The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case.”
Google is still the dominant player in search. But AI technology has the potential to radically transform the landscape.
“Today, tens of millions of people use GenAI chatbots, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, to gather information that they previously sought through internet search,” Mehta wrote. “These GenAI chatbots are not yet close to replacing [general search engines], but the industry expects that developers will continue to add features to GenAI products to perform more like GSEs.”
To Google’s credit, it understands the risk GenAI poses to its core business and has its own, Gemini, backed by its own search might.
And now, in the context of a competitive marketplace, it’s harder to justify harsh restrictions on Google. The rising popularity and investment interest in AI companies means there are, or will be, clear alternatives to Google’s search empire. Thus, tougher antitrust remedies placed on Google would also limit its ability to compete with AI upstarts in the nascent arena of AI-infused answer engines.
