From PC Mag: Chrome isn’t going anywhere, and neither are Google’s payments to developers of competing browsers to keep its search engine as their default.
The ruling that US District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta handed down Tuesday in the Google search-antitrust case gave the plaintiffs—the Department of Justice, joined by 49 states, the District of Columbia, and two US territories—much less than they’d asked for last year after the judge found Google had created an illegal monopoly in search.
In his 230-page opinion for the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Mehta wrote that he considered remedies for Google’s illegal conduct “with a healthy dose of humility.” He also emphasized his awareness of how AI search engines and chatbots could already be gnawing away at Google’s lock on the search market, which Statcounter data for August put at 93% in mobile and 76% on desktops in the US.
“The money flowing into this space, and how quickly it has arrived, is astonishing,” Mehta wrote of generative-AI firms. “These companies already are in a better position, both financially and technologically, to compete with Google than any traditional search company has been in decades (except perhaps Microsoft).”
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