This week’s monopoly round-up has lots of stuff in it, as usual. I won’t be sending one next Sunday, as I’ll be on vacation. Some of the news of the week includes a child sex scandal revealed at the NFL Players Association, Ticketmaster got humiliated in Maine, and new data was released showing it’s increasingly hard for big business to find jurors who don’t hate corporations.

But I want to focus on the soon-to-come decision from the Google search monopolization case. And that starts with something that happened this week, when artificial intelligence chatbot firm Perplexity made a very public offer to buy the Chrome browser, used by 4 billion people, for $34 billion from Google.

The offer itself is interesting, but far more intriguing is why Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas was so public about something Google’s board would certainly turn down. After all, Chrome is one of Google’s key mechanisms to control the search market, and is an on-ramp to its AI chatbot. There’s no way Google, on its own, would consider selling it. But it may not be up to Google whether it keeps Chrome.

Judge Amit Mehta, who is presiding over the Google remedy in its search antitrust trial, is considering forcing the search giant to spin off the browser as part of the remedy, though he is questioning his own legal authority to do so. And it’s a pressing matter; Mehta said he will try to reach the final decision this month, as the clerk that has been assisting him throughout the trial is leaving in August. One practical question for Mehta was whether Chrome was a viable business outside of Google, which Google disputed. Perplexity’s offer is meant to convey the message that yes, a break-up of Google is viable. Please do it.

The remedy proposal goes far beyond a possible spinoff of Chrome. It has four elements. It seeks to: (1) allow new entrants into search by ending Google’s control of chokepoints for search distribution, like selling Chrome, regulating Android, and ending its payments to Apple for being the default search engine on the iPhone; (2) eliminate Google’s head start by forcing Google to syndicate its search feed and share certain data with rivals; (3) give power back to publishers by letting them opt-out of AI training while remaining part of Google search results; and (4) ensure the nascent search-adjacent AI-chatbot model, where chatbots are integrated with search engines, is competitive.

Jonathan Kanter, who ran the Antitrust Division under Biden, went on CNBC to discuss the importance of the Chrome spinoff proposal. It’s worth watching, because Kanter was the architect of the remedy proposal for Google.

There are a two other parts of the remedy worth thinking about, outside of the details. The first is that the President himself may try to intervene personally, which is something that hasn’t happened in the antitrust world in our lifetimes. Donald Trump loves being in the middle of big deals, and litigation between his Antitrust Division and a multi-trillion dollar firm is a very big deal. Also, Trump reacts to what’s on TV, especially CNBC, and the Google remedy is going to be all over the business press. He is also strongly influenced by what his various wealthy advisors tell him, and they will have strong views. Steve Bannon will no doubt discuss it as well.

And then of course Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has made offers to Trump, and will make more, through a variety of middlemen. Congress too will likely react, with members expressing various forms of approval or disapproval. This remedy, in other words, is going to become very political, and Trump is almost certainly going to see it as a leverage point for his own interests.

There are a few complications. The first is the Antitrust Division isn’t the only plaintiff, there are state attorneys general as well. And that means he can’t just settle the case on his own terms, but would have to bring Democratic law enforcement officials along. That’s doable, the Antitrust Division has a lot of power, but it’s not a slam dunk. The second complication is Judge Mehta. A judge’s remedy order is a court order, and changing it will require petitioning that judge. Mehta won’t be happy if Trump chooses to blow up a judicial process that’s taken a really long time and has a voluminous court record.

The third complication is the politics. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the President involving himself directly in the restructuring of one of the most important corporations in America after that company has been found liable for monopolization. There will be plenty of people who say that the President shouldn’t have a role in an independent process so they can look sophisticated without having to learn anything about antitrust law or the case. But they are wrong. We have elections to choose the people who enforce the laws, and Trump won in 2024. Restructuring Google is a law enforcement matter. But of course, there’s a difference between enforcing antitrust laws and extracting concessions for unrelated or corrupt purposes, and Trump doesn’t have a great track record on that front.

All of which is to say that this remedy decision, aside from one of the most important antitrust decisions of all time, could also have incredibly weird politics.

The second part of the remedy worth considering is how this decision could determine the future of computing in a democracy. There’s a veritable cottage industry of AI-focused think tanks and panels in D.C., but 95% of them ignore antitrust. And in 2023, I noted that this search case would likely structure the industry, since it is an inflection point when artificial intelligence is emerging.

The stakes here are immensely high. In the last technological inflection point, the shift from desktop to mobile, enforcers wrote rules to facilitate monopolization, and allow Google, Facebook, and Apple to dominate our phones. That occurred by the FTC closing its investigation in 2012 against Google with a unanimous vote, and then allowing Facebook to buy Instagram. That was, however, a different political moment.

As The Economist noted, Google’s new AI Now chatbot engine, which it has inserted above nearly all search results, is destroying the open web.

There are also some really ugly numbers from Digital Content Next:

Many of the AI chatbot firms testified in the trial. A chatbot is neat technology, but without access to a good search engine, chatbots tend to hallucinate, get obvious things wrong, and are stuck giving information based on the data they were trained on, without access to things that happened after the date their training ended. When paired with a search engine, however, the chatbot can search the web for what it doesn’t know. So all of them - from OpenAI to Anthropic to Perplexity - need access to Google’s search to make their products as high quality as Google’s Gemini. Without that, there’s a non-trivial chance the industry, after a burst of competition, turns into a monopoly or duopoly.

And that would be catastrophic.

And now, the rest of the round-up. I’ll discuss a number of really fun stories. For instance, Ticketmaster got a righteous humiliation from the Portland city council, Delta Airlines lost its antitrust immunity on flights from the U.S. to Mexico because they made someone mad in the administration, the NFL Player’s Association is enduring a pedophilia scandal, and Americans are so mad at big business that companies are having trouble finding jurors who don’t hate them. Oh and Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson got laughed out of court for one of his stupid little antics.

All after the paywall...