Reed’s view
Google was spared the worst on Tuesday, with a federal judge rejecting a US Department of Justice request to force it to spin off its Chrome browser.
But court rulings are less relevant in trustbusting Big Tech than newer, disruptive technology, as we’ve said before. And in Google’s case, its cash cow — online search advertising — is already in jeopardy, and ironically, because of Google itself.
It paid for massive data centers full of tensor processing units. It paid for the salaries of top AI researchers lured from academia, who were able to test their theories for the first time, thanks to… Google’s massive, concentrated size.
What did the firm do with its AI research? It published papers and presented its findings for everyone to see. That included AlphaFold, an AI program that can predict protein structures and revolutionized biotech. And it included the Attention is all you need paper, which taught the world how to scale transformer model architectures. ChatGPT owes its existence to that paper.
And now the ChatGPT moment has jeopardized Google’s core business.
It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that Google, no matter what the legal punishment is for its monopolistic behavior, has two options: innovate or die.
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Room for Disagreement
The ruling was met with criticism from some lawmakers and industry executives who don’t believe market conditions are enough to challenge Google’s dominance, the Verge reported. “We do not believe the remedies ordered by the court will force the changes necessary to adequately address Google’s illegal behavior,” DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg said, adding that it’s time for Congress to step in.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a democrat from Minnesota, agreed: “Through three administrations, our antitrust enforcers have proven that Google’s tactics endanger the future of a free and open internet and risk choking off innovation in critical areas like artificial intelligence.”
Notable
- Since the lawsuit against Google began in 2020, the internet ecosystem has changed, and the company is facing “the first real threat to its power” in two decades with the rise of major AI players, the Washington Post editorial board wrote. “Mehta’s opinion recognizes that reshaping a market that’s already being reshaped is a formidable challenge,” it said.