Google, Ministry of Justice, face the climactic confrontation in the search for monopoly

Google will return Friday to the Federal Court to postpone the attempt by the United States Ministry of Justice to overthrow its Internet Empire at the same time as it sails in a central passage to artificial intelligence which could reduce its power.

The legal and technological threats faced by Google are among the main questions which will be dissected during the end of the arguments of a legal proceedings which will determine the changes imposed on the company following its dominant search engine declared as an illegal monopoly by the American district judge Amit Mehta last year.

Bounding evidence presented during a recent three -week hearings section, lawyers from the Ministry of Justice will try to persuade Mehta to order a radical upheaval which includes the ban on paying Google to lock your search engine as defect in smart devices and a prescription forcing the company to sell its chromed browser.

Google lawyers should say that only minor concessions are necessary, especially since the upheavals triggered by the progress of artificial intelligence already enhance the research landscape, because alternative conversational research options take place from AI startups which hope to use the case of the Department of Justice at four and a quarter of the justice to win the next frontage technological.

“During the weeks of testimonies, we heard a series of well-funded companies wishing to access Google technology so that they do not have to innovate,” wrote Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice-president of Google regulatory affairs in a blog post earlier this month. “What we have not heard is how the extreme doj’s proposals would benefit consumers.”

After the closing arguments of a day, Mehta will spend much of the summer to think about a decision he plans to render before the Labor Day. Google has already promised to call on the decision that has marked its search engine as a monopoly, a step that he cannot take as long as the judge orders an appeal.

Although both sides of this confrontation agree that AI is an inflection point for the future of industry, they have disparate opinions on the way the change will affect Google.

The Ministry of Justice maintains that the technology of AI in itself will not reduce the power of Google, arguing additional legal constraints must be slapped on a search engine which is the main reason why its parent company, Alphabet Inc., is evaluated at 2 dollars.

Google has already deployed the AI ​​to transform its search engine into a response engine, an effort that has so far contributed to maintaining its perch as the main internet gateway despite the breakthroughs by alternatives from Openai and perplexity.

The Ministry of Justice maintains that a disinvestment of the Chrome browser that the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai helped to build almost 20 years ago would be among the most effective countermeasures against Google which continued to raise massive volumes of browser and personal data that could be used to keep its domination at the time of AI. The leaders of Openai and Perplexity said last month that they would be subject to bidders for the Chrome browser if Mehta orders its sale.

The debate on the fate of Google also withdrew the opinions of Apple, developers of mobile applications, legal researchers and startups.

Apple, which collects more than $ 20 billion per year to make Google the default search engine on the iPhone and its other aircraft, has deposited memories to compete by the Ministry of Justice at 10 years of these lucrative locking agreements. Apple told the judge that the prohibition of contracts would deprive the money company that it trains in its own research, and that the ban could even make Google even more powerful because the company would be able to keep its money while consumers would end up choosing its search engine anyway. Cupertino, California, also told the judge that a ban would not force him to build his own search engine to compete with Google.

In other deposits, a group of legal specialists said that the disinvestment proposed by Chrome by the Ministry of Justice would be an inappropriate penalty which would inject unjustified interference into the activities of a company. Meanwhile, former officials of the Federal Trade Commission James Cooper and Andrew Staves warned that another proposal that would force Google to share its data with rival search engines “does not take into account the expectations that users have developed over time concerning confidentiality, security and management” of their personal information.

The APP association, a group that mainly represents small software developers, also advised Mehta not to adopt the changes proposed by the Ministry of Justice because of the training effects they would have in the technology industry.

Coporing Google in the way the Ministry of Justice was considering makes it more difficult for startups to achieve their objective of being acquired, wrote the App association. “The developers will be overcome by uncertainty” If Google is torn, “says the group.

Buy Y Combinator, an incubator who helped create hundreds of startups of a collectively value of around 800 billion dollars of documents deposited for the spectacular redesign of Google, whose immense power has discouraged the venture capital of investing in areas which are considered to be part of the “killing zone” of the company.

Startups “must also be able to put their products in the hands of users, without restrictive and self-proclaim traffic which locks important distribution channels. As you go, Google has locked the most critical distribution channels, freezing the general research text and research on the markets in static competition for more than a decade,” said Cominator in Mehta.