AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke
Google returns to federal court on Friday, simultaneously dodging the US Department of Justice’s attempt to defeat the Internet empire, while navigating a massive shift towards artificial intelligence that could undermine its power.
The legal and technical threats facing Google are one of the key issues that will be analyzed at the deadline for legal proceedings determining changes imposed on the company due to the declaration of the dominant search engine declared as illegal monopoly by US District Judge Amit Mehta last year.
The Justice Department’s lawyer, evidence of branding presented at the recent three-week hearing, tries to convince Mehta to ban Google from locking search engines as the default for smart devices and order radical shakeups that include orders that require the sale of Chrome browsers.
Google’s lawyers are expected to argue that only minor concessions are needed, especially as the turbulence caused by advances in artificial intelligence is reshaping the search situation, and are rolling out from AI startups that want to use the four-year case of the review agency to get better at the next technology platitude.
“For weeks, I’ve heard from a series of funded companies that have been keen to access Google’s technology that they don’t need to innovate themselves,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post earlier this month. “What we didn’t hear was how the extreme DOJ proposal would benefit consumers.”
After the day’s closing discussion, Mehta will reflect on the decision to publish much of the summer before Labor Day. Google has already vowed to appeal the ruling that it branded its search engine as a monopoly.
Both sides of this showdown agree that AI is the industry’s future inflection point, but have different views on how the shift will affect Google.
The Justice Department has argued that AI technology itself does not suppress Google’s power, and that additional legal suppression must slap search engines, the main reason why parent company Alphabet Inc. is valued at $2 trillion.
Mehta showed in court Friday that it was undecided how much AI that will shake up the search market should be incorporated into his upcoming ruling. “This is something I’ve struggled with,” Meta said early in the hearing.
Prosecutor David Dahlquist urged judges to issue visionary relief measures to prevent Google from using search monopoly to unfairly profit in AI races, making the search market “open” to competition.
Google has already deployed AI to convert search engines into answer engines. This has helped to maintain perches as the main gateway of the Internet, despite being invaded by alternatives such as Openai and confusion.
The Justice Department claims that the sale of the Chrome browser that Google CEO Sundar Pichai helped build nearly 20 years ago is one of the most effective measures against Google. Executives from both Openai and Perplexity testified last month that if Mehta ordered a sale, they would become avid bidder for the Chrome browser.
The debate about Google’s fate also drew opinions from Apple, mobile app developers, legal scholars and startups.
Apple, which has raised over $20 billion a year to make Google the default search engine for iPhones and other devices, has filed a brief against the Department of Justice’s ban on such a lucrative lock-in contracts for a decade. Apple told the judge that by banning contracts, it would take the company of what its company is aiming for its own research, and that the ban could even make Google even stronger, but because consumers are supposed to choose a search engine anyway, it could even make Google even stronger. The Cupertino, California company also told judges it would not force judges to ban it from building its own search engine to compete with Google.
In other filings, a group of legal scholars said the Justice Department’s proposal to sell chrome would be an inappropriate penalty to inject unfair government interference into the business of the company. Meanwhile, former Federal Trade Commission officials James Cooper and Andrew Stever warned that sharing personal information rival search engines and their data with rival search engines “doesn’t take into account the time they’ve developed over the years that users have spent their time in terms of privacy, security and stewardship.”
The App Association, a group representing most small software developers, advised Mehta not to adopt the Department of Justice’s proposed changes due to ripple effects across the technology industry.
Hobbing Google in the way the Justice Department envisions makes it even more difficult for startups to achieve their goal of winning, writes App Association. “Developers will be overcome by uncertainty,” the group claims if Google is torn apart.
Original issue: May 30, 2025, 8:27am EDT
