The Justice Department needs to be taught extra about Google’s AI technique with a purpose to decide what sorts of modifications it’s going to ask for to resolve Google’s monopoly in search.
The request got here throughout a listening to on Friday in a federal courtroom in Washington, DC, the place Google and the DOJ met earlier than Judge Amit Mehta, who lately dominated in favor of the DOJ and agreed that Google is an unlawful monopolist. Mehta’s choice formally ended the primary section of the trial, which targeted on whether or not Google is liable underneath antitrust regulation. Now the events are transferring onto the treatments section, the place the federal government will suggest options to right the unlawful habits and restore competitors to the market.
DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist informed the courtroom that the federal government wants extra discovery to grasp the state of Google’s enterprise lately. The trial lined offers Google made as much as the early a part of this decade, together with a longstanding settlement to supply search companies on Apple merchandise. But the DOJ’s analysis wrapped up simply as Google — alongside would-be rivals like Microsoft — was starting to push a brand new sort of search product constructed round generative AI. As Dahlquist talked about, Google’s title for its AI has even modified since final 12 months’s trial: it was Bard then, and now it’s Gemini, so the staff is requesting extra details about Google’s newer enterprise choices, together with round AI.
The events nonetheless haven’t agreed on a timeline for the treatments section, which is able to embrace one other trial-like continuing. But Mehta indicated he’d like these arguments to happen within the first half of subsequent 12 months. While nothing’s set in stone, they anticipate it to take a lot much less time than the 10-week trial that started final September — extra like per week or two. The events are anticipated to file a brand new scheduling proposal by subsequent Friday.
