The Justice Department wants to know how to change a search engine monopoly
The US Department of Justice on Monday opened its antitrust trial against Google over its search engine business. Google’s lawyers argued that the DOJ’s list of remedies for the case is a “wishlist for competitors” and that it will enable competitors to get resources that took Google decades to develop. Google had been found to be a monopoly in the case.
Big Tech is back in court
A US court has ruled that Google’s purchase of DoubleClick does not hurt competition and its “ad tech” tools are “simple, affordable and effective”. However, the court also warned Google over its failure to preserve internal communications citing an internal messaging app which “deleted records of chats between employees”. Google had said it disagreed with the court’s decision.
The ad tech monopoly case came to an abrupt end
The UK High Court has ruled that Google’s online advertising practices are “likely anti-competitive”, allowing the US to continue its case. The case was filed in 2023 and concerns an intricate web of programs that sell ad space around the web, like on a news site or a recipes page. In its ruling, the court said Google’s acquisition of digital advertising platform DoubleClick didn’t harm competition.
DeepMind has an artificial intelligence robot slam-dunking a basketball
Google-backed startup Collected Artificial Intelligence has developed a new model called ‘Gemini Robotics’ which can respond to spoken commands and do things likeFolding paper, hand over veggies, and putting a pair of glasses in a case. The robots rely on the model to connect items that are visible with possible actions in order to do what they’re told.
Trump’s DOJ doesn’t seem to mind if Google is broken up
The US Department of Justice has filed a revised proposal with a judge, asking him to force Google to sell its web browser Google Chrome and potentially Android as punishment for monopoly. Last year, Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of monopoly and fined it $1 billion. The DOJ had accused Google of anticompetitive practices to protect its search dominance.
3 Top Engineers were from DeepMind
Google’s AI arm OpenAI has said it has hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from rival Google DeepMind, all of whom will work in its newly opened office in Zurich, Switzerland. Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai will be joining the company to work on multimodal artificial intelligence models capable of performing tasks in different mediums.
The DOJ says that it must open up its search monopoly if it is to sell Chrome
Google has been asked by Justice Department to either divest from Android phones or have the court supervise its Android division to monitor any possible instances of Google using Android to kneecap rivals. In August, Justice Department ruled that Google had acted as an illegal monopoly in its search engine and had to be brought to justice.
What a second Trump presidency means for tech
After US President-elect Donald Trump took to social media to congratulate him for winning the election, Google’s Sundar Pichai wrote on Twitter, “Thank you for the confidence in me and in the future of Google.” Amazon’s Andy Jassy said, “I’m looking forward to working with him as the FTC chair.” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg tweeted, “Excited to be working with Trump for a second term.”
A deal was signed by the search engine for next- generation nuclear plants
Amazon is teaming up with US-based energy company Energy Northwest to develop a system for deploying next-generation nuclear power plants in the US. The deal will allow Amazon to procure electricity generated from Energy Northwest’s nuclear plants, the companies said. This comes after Google announced it will use next-generation nuclear power plants to run its data centres.
Now, after suing both Google and Samsung, it’s Epic’s turn
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said Google’s third-party app store Auto Blocker isn’t designed to protect users against malware. “It’s designed to prevent competition,” he added. Epic has filed a lawsuit against Google and its partners, accusing them of obstruction of competition in the digital space. The lawsuit further claims that Google’s third-party app store is “an exceptionally onerous 21-step process”.