In the US, Google was found to operate an illegal monopoly in online search. Surprising, right? Google it if you've not heard of it. The company now shared their rebuttal to any potential court-ordered remedies. I'll point out what I think of it.
➡️ "Forcing Google to share your search queries, clicks, and results with competitors risks your privacy and security." It's new to me that Google cares about privacy. They're the largest collector of data about people online. If they really cared about privacy, they should follow through with it. Instead, this strikes me as fear-mongering.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
➡️ "Hampering Google’s AI tools risks holding back American innovation at a critical moment." Google had had an AI chatbot like OpenAI's but chose not to release it. Incumbents are usually terrible at innovating when it potentially hurts their core business model, as famously found by Clayton Christensen. AI is one of them. It's Google incentive to hold back those efforts, insofar as they could disrupt information discovery online.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_…
➡️ "Splitting off Chrome or Android would break them — and many other things". Google claims these are open-source tools, when this is false and misleading. They're tightly controlled by Google and built to reinforce Google's other business lines in an anticompetitive way. My co-authors and I wrote a widely read paper on it. We think that critical digital infrastructure shouldn't be abused in the way that Google current does it.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
➡️ "Changes to the online advertising market would make online ads less valuable for publishers and merchants, and less useful for consumers" This is very speculative. We can't know this for sure. In the short-term, this might be true, as for any market disruption. Yet, we can wonder what the internet should be built for. Should it be built to support ads, as it does currently, or rather to support anything else, as most users probably wish? We don't turn to Google Search to study ads but this is what we get. Due to lack of competitive pressure, Search has gotten worse and worse over the past years. Google doesn't have an interest in letting you find information fast but rather showing you many ads on Google Search and also on third-party website, where, too, they told the largest market share in advertising provision. It's time to correct this.
➡️ "Unreasonable restrictions on how Google promotes our search engine would create friction for consumers and harm businesses." This seems to engage with the heart of the US court decision, which is Google's annual 20 bn USD payments to other companies to be the default search engine. Google acknowledges that it won't stand a chance to convince the court that this claim is true and therefore put this argument last in its list of arguments.
Source:
blog.google/outreach-initiat…