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📆This Week’s Topic
This week, we’ll be talking about how the Antitrust Lawsuit against Google hardly affected Google- specifically Google search. We’ll be talking about how it happened, and the specific effects on the search engine business.
💳 Cause & Effect
Google Search is considered one of the best businesses in the whole of the technology industry. Google Search is used around 13 billion times a day, which is hugely successful for Google because of ads and Pay-Per-Click(advertisers pay for ads to be put on Google search results). The search engine helps Alphabet,(the parent company of Google) generate more revenue than any other US-based company, including other tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple. Google was sued by multiple entities including the department of justice (DOJ) and others. In a ruling issued by Judge Amit P. Mehta, Google will avoid paying the harshest penalties, and while they are submitting to giving some search data to rivals, their monopoly remains mainly unchallenged, and their business will progress without any major hiccups.
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📊 Statistics
In a trial last year, it came to light that Google abused their search-engine monopoly. Now, they’ll only have to make minor changes, such as sharing their data with competitors such as OpenAI and Microsoft, making a committee to oversee its business practices. Sharing data has been the core of Google Search, and now it could help other engines such as the two noted above as well as Perplexity. The data to be shared has been described as “the oxygen” for search engines, and Google has a lot of it. Over the years, Google has amassed nine times the data of rivals, which has helped the company tailor more specific result to user queries. That factor helped Google be such a leader the in the search engine business.
🔚 Outcome
Judge Mehta said that Google only needs to share a small amount of data, but even that could help other search engines refine their searches as to provide better results. However, the Judge declined the US Governments request for the Google search index, a tool that helps users find what they’re looking for more easily, to be shared among competitors. He declined a similar request about another database that helps find people, places, and things in Google searches. Jim Jansen, principal scientist in the artificial intelligence group of the Qatar Computing Research Institute says that “It’s hard to know how much Microsoft, OpenAI and others will benefit.” Nowadays, Google collects so much data that the information shared could be relatively useless or “noise.”
⛱ Consumer Effect
For Google, their stock rose by 8% after the ruling came through, as investors reveled in Google's win. However a blow for them is the complications in data sharing, as most users only agree to share their data with Google, and not with third party sources such as other search engines. This could mean a number of things for consumers, such as having to re-select preferences on certain websites, but likely would pose more problems for Google rather than users.
🏢Business Effect
For businesses, they might need to change the way they share data, as to align with the Judge’s ruling. However it is uncertain who will be affected, depending on which data is shared with other engines. Google has to now adapt a five-person business committee similar to that of Microsoft, to monitor its business practices, protect user privacy, and share appropriate data. This part of the ruling is practically the same as to when Microsoft lost its own antitrust ruling twenty five years ago, when Microsoft agreed to create an antitrust compliance team that reviewed products, ensuring their lawfulness before release.
⏳ Final Summary
All in all, this is not a huge loss for Google, as they’ll likely still have the upper hand in online queries in years to come. However depending on what data competitors receive this could be a win but of indeterminable magnitude. It will be interesting to see how consumers are affected in time, and if results on other engines improve.
🙏Thank You & Important Information
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Grayson Stein & Jacob Gans
Friday Finance
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