Google has its tentacles full these days. While pouring a sea of money into developing so-called generative AI, the company is up against two major antitrust cases brought by the federal government and a number of states. The lengthy suit on Google’s search monopoly has led to a guilty verdict, with sentencing expected late next summer. The Department of Justice’s recently announced goal of a breakup, which would force Alphabet to sell off its widely used Chrome browser, is a potentially major divestiture. But with appeals, it will be years before the final outcome is known.
At the same time, Google parent Alphabet’s advertising technology, the real peach, is now itself on trial. This second trial case has major implications due to the company’s monopolies and oligopolies in various segments of auction-based online ad markets, now a $600 billion a year industry.
In the wake of the historic summer ruling that Google has a monopoly on the online search market, the Justice Department has officially requested a limited breakup, requiring Alphabet to divest itself of Chrome, Google’s popular web browser and the basis of the operating system for its popular Chromebooks.
This is a major threat to Google, since its broadly adopted browser defaults searches to Google’s search engine, one of the company’s many tactics to draw in search queries, training its algorithms and helping Google maintain its dominant market share. As Chrome is used by an estimated two-thirds of global web users, the loss of these default queries and related advertising and…
Auteur: Rob Larson
