Introduction to Google’s Antitrust Case
In the tech world, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to have come to the rescue of the old guard company of Silicon Valley, Google, and its Chrome web browser. About a year ago, the future of Google looked shaky, with a US court in Washington, DC, finding that the search market was illegally monopolized with enormous payments to other companies to ensure that the search engine was the default option, effectively blocking other competitors.
A Case and a Technical Court Case
The judge in the case, Amit Mehta, took over a year to decide on the punishment. His final decision, announced on September 2, 2025, was a relief to the company. It seems that the tide had turned. In a 230-page "Memorandum Opinion," Mehta decided that Google would not have to be broken up, but would have to share some information with competitors to increase competition and create a supervisory committee to manage compliance.
Ki Chatbots on the Rise in Silicon Valley
The creation of generative AI has changed the course of this case. When the case started in 2020, AI was less of an issue. Today, it is almost impossible to avoid. In the industry, there are concerns that AI-driven search engines will massively disrupt conventional search engines, if not replace them, a threat that the judge now accepts as a real option. Google has added chatbot functions, and Openai, the company behind Chatgpt, started its operator browser this year.
AI and the Future of Online Search
"Chrome is a browser, and for many, it is still an entry point for internet use," said Jinjun Xiong, director of the University at the Buffalo Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. However, AI is quickly changing how users can find information online. Traditional search interfaces are being replaced by chat interfaces, and this trend will continue to accelerate. Three things have promoted this shift: Chatgt’s free model and its simple access to the power of AI, the awareness of technology through constant reporting on the media, and amazing technological AI progress.
AI Turns Search Engines on Their Head
In order to underline his newly acquired understanding of AI and the online search business, Mehta devoted 30 pages in his judgment to explain what it is and how the market works. Google is still dominant in the search industry, but "artificial intelligence technologies, especially generative AI, could still prove to be game-changers." Although this AI technology is not yet almost a replacement for general search engines, "the industry expects that developers will continue to add functions to generative AI products to make them perform more like general search engines."
A Very Powerful Ecosystem
Some observers expect little change in how Google will do business after the judgment. Others say the company still has to figure out how it works. The real problem is the authorization of the ecosystems created by companies such as Google, said Xiong. Google will be more careful as it maneuvers this ecosystem and its competition. "Google or Chrome have built up a very powerful ecosystem around the various tools that people are heavily dependent on, such as Google Mail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Drive, Maps, etc.," said Xiong. These existing ecosystems make it difficult for other companies to compete and collapse. Xiong would like to see Big Tech hug an open ecosystem, which the judge’s judgment did not actively encourage.
