More to Google story

The court clearly stated that it was fine for Google to have a monopoly with search services because they have the best solution. The court’s concern is how Google maintains the monopoly with their Joint Cooperation Agreements where billions of dollars are handed over to tech companies to make Google search the default. The other complaint in the ruling is Google’s monopoly on search text ads. It’s weird that the picture with that article is from San Salvador when the case clearly only impacts the U.S. market. In the EU they enacted some legislation that addresses the same problem and default search lists came into effect over a year ago. Users choose their own default engine at setup time. It seems that Google’s search market share across the pond was over 92% in June, even higher than in the U.S.

The liability and remedy phase of the case is underway, Google may be able to appeal and so may the feds and the states involved given two of the four complaints were quashed by Mehta. If Liedtke was paying attention, he’d know LLMs are already being embedded in existing search services not related to the AI assistants he listed. He’d also know that OpenAI initiated GPTsearch to compete in the search engine arena. He is right that the search space will be transformed before U.S. vs. Google is finalized.

Howard Roth

Foster City