Leadership and lawyers at Google are building the next phase of the company’s legal defense on AI to try and fight the Department of Justice’s antitrust case. Earlier this summer, D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled in favor of the DOJ that Google’s search text advertising and online search engine businesses were monopolies.
Last Tuesday, the DOJ issued a 32-page report to the courts outlining possible remedies it may pursue — including breaking up the company — in the next stage of the litigation.
Google Responds To DOJ Cites AI As Antitrust Defense
Shortly after the DOJ report dropped, Google’s Vice President, Regulatory Affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, published a blog post calling the DOJ’s proposal “radical” and stated that consumers would suffer as a result.
“This case is about a set of search distribution contracts. Rather than focus on that, the government seems to be pursuing a sweeping agenda that will impact numerous industries and products, with significant unintended consequences for consumers, businesses and American competitiveness,” Mulholland wrote.
“The DOJ’s outline also comes at a time when competition in how people find information is blooming, with all sorts of new entrants emerging and new technologies like AI transforming the industry,” she added.
The company statement went on to assert that if the DOJ’s proposals are enacted by the courts — hampering Google’s AI tools and vision for that technology — they would be detrimental to US competitiveness within the AI space.
“Not only is AI a new industry, but it’s hard to think of a technology more important for America’s technological and economic leadership. Business models in AI, much less winners and losers, have yet to be determined, and competition globally is fierce,” wrote Mulholland.
“There are enormous risks to the government putting its thumb on the scale of this vital industry — skewing investment, distorting incentives, hobbling emerging business models — all at precisely the moment that we need to encourage investment, new business models, and American technological leadership,” she concluded.
Google’s AI Defense Is Novel But Not Enough
Robin Nunn, is a lawyer with deep tech experience, antitrust litigation and is a nationally recognized legal expert regarding corporate compliance programs for a variety of technologies including artificial intelligence. During a Zoom call, she said the final outcome of this case will likely have far-reaching impacts.
“If the government wins this, I feel like the entire tech industry could really face a power shift that ripples throughout the next few decades since Google has right now, more than 90% of search engine market, which is a pretty big number,” said Nunn.
She went on to say that Google’s AI defense is clever but not particularly persuasive as a countermeasure against the judge’s monopolistic verdict upon appeal.
“Everybody sort of thinks that AI is the 4th industrial revolution, right? So it’s a good one to point to if you don’t want to change your business model, I just think that’s going to be tough,” she said.
Part of Google’s defensive pivot rests on the fact that AI platforms such as Perplexity and Copilot are increasingly being used as internet search engines and not just for generating content.
But Nunn explained that Google’s defense is weakened since Google also has its own AI model called Gemini, which would seem to undermine the competitive benefits of AI that Google purports.
“I think that where the AI argument will not work is that the court is really focused on a handful of companies who own most of the infrastructure, tooling and distribution, which makes it impossible for new companies to truly compete,” she said.
“So even if Scrappy AI and its independents started forcing the device manufacturers to use something else, I think it’ll be a long time coming before any of the [AI] competitors actually made headway against Google,” Nunn concluded.
