cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36778872
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Today, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division won significant remedies in its monopolization case against Google in online search. In United States et al. v. Google, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia prohibited Google from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app; ordered Google to make certain search index and user-interaction data available to rivals and potential rivals; and ordered Google to offer search and search text ads syndication services to enable rivals and potential rivals to compete.
The court’s ruling today recognizes the need for remedies that will pry open the market for general search services, which has been frozen in place for over a decade. The ruling also recognizes the need to prevent Google from using the same anticompetitive tactics for its GenAI products as it used to monopolize the search market, and the remedies will reach GenAI technologies and companies.
I don’t trust Google at all, but there’s an argument to be made that people using Google trust Google. Now that trust is being forcibly compromised by having Google share all that data with anyone? That data was presumably for sale anyways, but now it’s just there. This is worse than the worst possible outcome I would have imagined.