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“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” concluded Judge Amit Mehta last year, in a significant ruling against the company. It had acted illegally to maintain a dominant position in search, Mehta concluded, with a variety of tactics, chief among them spending tens of billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine in desktop and smartphone web browsers. Last week, following a May trial, he outlined what would be done about it: Not very much at all, actually.

No forced spin-off of Chrome. No breakup of Google’s interdependent properties. No data-sharing from the company’s advertising business. Most surprising was the lack of prohibition on search preference deals, a centerpiece of the ruling that would have been relatively straightforward to enforce. Instead, Google will be barred from “any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app” — a rule that does not affect search default deals like the one Google has with Apple, on which the company spends 20 billion dollars a year — and will “make available to Qualified Competitors certain searchindex and user-interaction data” from “narrowed” datasets.

These are the sort of focused, toothless remedies that one might have expected before Mehta’s surprisingly strident ruling last year. But in its context, they come as a surprise, too, which Mehta acknowledges and tries to explain right away:

Much has changed since the end of the liability trial, though some things have not. Google is still the dominant firm in the relevant product markets. No existing rival has wrested market share from Google. And no new competitor has entered the market. But artificial intelligence technologies, particularly generative AI (“GenAI”), may yet prove to be game changers. Today, tens of millions of people use GenAI chatbots, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, to gather information that they previously sought through internet search. These GenAI chatbots are not yet close to replacing GSEs, but the industry expects that developers will continue to add features to GenAI products to perform more like GSEs.

He then argues that the court was simply overtaken by events. “No witness at the liability trial testified that GenAI products posed a near-term threat to [search],” he writes, while “[t]he very first witness at the remedies hearing, by contrast, placed GenAI front and center as a nascent competitive threat.” No need for the government to step in and perhaps create a bunch of unintended consequences, he suggests — the market might take care of this one itself, a case he makes through dozens of pages of general explanatory writing about AI. (Speaking of markets: Google’s stock rose 8 percent the day the remedies were announced.)

As a narrow argument against antitrust over-reach, it all makes narrow sense. But it’s easy to imagine how his survey of the landscape in late 2025 could itself be overtaken — or just made to look silly — by industry developments. The day after Mehta’s ruling, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on Apple’s plans for the coming version of the iPhone:

Apple Inc. is planning to launch its own artificial intelligence-powered web search tool next year, stepping up competition with OpenAI and Perplexity AI Inc.

The company is working on a new system — dubbed internally as World Knowledge Answers — that will be integrated into the Siri voice assistant, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple has discussed also eventually adding the technology to its Safari web browser and Spotlight, which is used to search from the iPhone home screen.

At first glance, this sounds an awful lot like what Mehta was saying. The rapid arrival of generative AI tools, which can perform a wide range of tasks, including internet search and search-like answers, means that Google’s dominance is less protected than it seemed, so much so that Apple, which was previously receiving tens of billions of dollars a year to funnel people into Google Search, and which is considered an AI laggard in the industry, is getting into the mix. Except, well:

The underlying technology enabling the new Siri could come in part from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple’s longtime partner in internet search. The companies reached a formal agreement this week for Apple to evaluate and test a Google-developed AI model to help power the voice assistant, the people said.

Interesting timing! In product terms, it makes sense for Apple to work with Google on something like this. Despite competing in a variety of ways, the two companies have worked together for years, and Google is the sort of (relatively) careful and conservative firm that Apple could trust to help build system-level features into its devices. Its models are competitive with the best from OpenAI and Anthropic, and it’s already built a lot of AI-ish features into Android. It makes sense for Google to work with Apple, too, but for reasons that should sound familiar from a certain 2024 court ruling: Deep integration with the iPhone for Google’s AI and search products, which the company increasingly treats as one category, would be a massive help not just in shoring up the newly wobbly “search” category, but in fending off companies like OpenAI to become the dominant company in consumer AI, too, whatever it ends up looking like. Google would be able to funnel users into its new products through Chrome, which it still owns, through Android, which has more total users than iOS, and through iPhones, iPads, and Macs — just like it did last time.

The rise of services like ChatGPT, which has rapidly accumulated hundreds of millions of users, and which Google clearly saw as a strategic threat, is potentially destabilizing for the categories where Google was deemed monopolistic, and makes predicting even the near future of consumer tech product trends unusually difficult. But in light of Mehta’s appeal to judicial “humility” in the context of rapid technological change, it seems notable that the very first relevant news after the court declined to put real pressure on Google is that the company might be teaming up with Apple to form yet another partnership, this one designed not just to keep guiding users to its products, but to hold onto them through the first competitive threat the company has had in nearly two decades. Two of the most powerful companies in the world, each of which has been accused by the government of monopolistic tendencies, worked together for years to fend off competition. It worked, and now they might do it again. At the very least, they’re free to try.

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