Back in the day when I was covering Google on a daily basis, I’d have spent hours poring over yesterday’s news that the judge in Google’s landmark antitrust case
essentially blinked. But twenty-odd years of experience leaves me with very little to say about how Google’s first anti-trust case has been
resolved, other than this: It’s a nothing burger, with a side of same-as-it-ever-was.
Over the course of nearly four years since the government brought its case, a lot has changed:
- The United States has veered away from liberal democracy toward illiberal autocracy, and the current administration is no longer interested in grand antitrust remedies that serve the public. Today, everything is seen through the lens of whether a given action or decision furthers the President’s power. Preserving the status quo gives him leverage over powerful actors – he can continue to threaten and bully, ensuring fealty and tribute. In this administration, as in Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing, no one is allowed to have more power than the Dear Leader.
- As I laid out in my predictions nine months ago, the tech industry is now the most powerful force in politics outside the President, and its two most muscular companies – Apple and Google – did not want their duopoly upended. We’ll likely never know what soft-power backroom deals were cut to avoid what nearly every legal scholar felt was justified action by the government, but to think those dynamics didn’t impact this decision is to ignore the reality of my first point above.
- OpenAI’s existence became a convenient foil. The emergence of generative AI has given Google (and the judge in this case) the ability to argue that the DOJ was fighting yesterday’s war. Sure, Google might have been a search monopolist, but look – OpenAI is proof that the market is always smarter than government regulators! Never mind the fact that search literally built the foundation for generative AI, or that generative AI is the natural evolution of search – a product that Google will continue to dominate now that government remedies have been rendered toothless.
Google – and its $20 billion partner Apple – are likely doing cartwheels today. Wall Street certainly is.
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