(Bloomberg) – The U.S. Department of Justice’s proposal to fix illegal monopoly in the Google online search market is easier to stimulate competition than the remedies provided by the company, which is the remedy provided by the company.
Government economics expert Tasneem Chipty said the department’s “remedial measures will have better opportunities to recover competition”. “Google’s remedies will tend to retain Google’s monopoly.”
Chipty testified several hours before Justice Amit Mehta was the final witness of the Justice Department. Mehta ruled last year that the tech giant had an illegal monopoly on the search market and is overseeing a three-week trial in Washington to consider a series of changes proposed by antitrust executors.
The Justice Department has asked Google to be forced to sell its popular Chrome web browser and share some of the data it collects to create search results. It also asked Mehta to ban Google from paying for search engine defaults — the bar also applies to Google’s AI products, including Gemini, which the government says has helped with the company’s illegal monopoly search.
Jennifer Rie, an antitrust analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence Agency, said it is unlikely that Mehta will eventually order the sale of Chrome, although the Justice Department has done a good job of demonstrating why the divest is needed and how it is done.
The government completed the presentation of testimony and evidence, marking half of the trial of remedies. On Tuesday afternoon, Google began to show that the Justice Department’s proposal was too extreme. The company has asserted that these remedies will harm U.S. consumers, the economy and position as a world technology leader. Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai is expected to testify in the coming days, as is Google’s search boss Liz Reid.
A large portion of the trial focused on emerging areas of generating AI, which witnesses and the Justice Department said could become a new access point for the network in the way browsers and smartphones run today. AI chatbots have been seen as an existential threat to traditional search engines because they can directly solve users’ problems with AI-Drafted Respons – replacing search results that need to be listed to people, which list search results pointed to on the web.
“The Justice Department shows that Google did the same thing with Gemini, the same as searching,” Rie said. “The Justice Department did a great job showing that AI products don’t have to take over universal search engines, but use them in conjunction with them.”
The Justice Department said it included Openai’s Nick Turley, confused Dmitry Shevelenko and Duckduckgo’s Gabriel Weinberg to describe what they are talking about Google’s harmful business practices and how the proposed remedy will undermine Monopoly.
Three company representatives – from Openai, confused and even Yahoo – said they would be interested in buying Chrome if Google is forced to strip it. According to court evidence, DuckDuckgo, one of Google’s browser competitors, even estimated sales of Chrome at “over $50 billion” based on its wide user base.
During the trial, Shevelenko said Google’s contract with Lenovo Group Ltd.’s Motorola prevented smartphone manufacturers from setting up confusing AI as the default assistant on their new devices. Motorola “can’t get rid of its Google obligations, so they can’t change the default assistant on the device,” said the Confusion executive.
Chipty, an economics expert at the Justice Department, also testified Tuesday that Google could take advantage of the popularity of generating AI to distribute its search services and obtain potential court-ordered remedies.
“For example, you can imagine that Google might pay a distributor to pre-install Google Gemini on the home screen of an Android device, just like it did in Google Search today,” Chipty said. “If something like this is allowed, we can expect to be in the same situation today.”
More stories like this are available Bloomberg.com
