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An antitrust ruling against Google is set to benefit the company’s AI rivals, after the search giant was forced to share its search data.
While Google’s parent company, Alphabet, dodged having to sell its Chrome browser, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that after a court battle that lasted years, the company would have to share its search data with other companies.
The case, which began in 2020, was in regard to Google’s dominance as a search engine, being the default search engine on a range of products, including its own Android and Chrome devices.
While the US Department of Justice had demanded that Chrome be sold by Google, the decision instead allows Google to keep Chrome, but rules that search data must be shared and revenue-sharing agreements to make Google the default browser, such as the one it has with Apple, be limited.
Google said the ruling is a win for the company and that the development of generative AI likely influenced the ruling.
“Today’s decision recognises how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information,” Google said in a statement on Tuesday (2 September).
“This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want.”
Judge Mehta acknowledged that generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Grok are used by millions, many of whom use the chatbots as a search engine.
However, these AI chatbots may be a greater threat to Google than the antitrust case, with former Google engineer Arvind Jain saying that AI is changing the role of Google and search.
“I think for Google right now, AI [is] a much bigger deal than the ruling. AI is fundamentally changing how the search product also works,” he said.
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