By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Google and the DOJ’s historic Monopoly case is coming to a close after months of debates. Attorneys are poised to spend all day making their closing arguments as the search giant fights to keep its Chrome business, something that could dramatically shape up the world of online search. Joining us now, we’ve got Adam Kovacevich, who’s the founder and CEO of the Chamber of Progress. Adam, great to speak with you. What are you anticipating when it comes to the decision in this case?
00:35 Adam Kovacevich
Well, the I’m kind of watching what I call the three Ds in this case. The first, as you said, is divestiture. Uh the Justice Department has asked Google to um, you know, be required to spin off Chrome. I think that’s very unlikely, um, but there’s been some discussion of that. The second is deals. Uh and that’s really the heart of this case, which is really uh Google’s deals with services like Apple and Samsung, search default deals. That’s the heart of the case. Does the judge approve restrictions on Google’s ability to pay for those default search deals going forward? And if so, what does that look like? Is it a blanket prohibition? Is it what some people call a ballot choice screen? We’ll see what that looks like. And the third is data. And this is really a wild card because what the Justice Department has asked for is for the court to mandate that Google share huge amounts of its search algorithms, search data with rivals, with rival search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo, uh based on a theory that Google, you know, used these search deals to gain insurmountable data advantage. That would really be a far-reaching, I think, remedy um that I I worry could disincentivize Google to keep investing in quality of its search results.
02:53 Speaker A
And I’m taking a look at some commentary this morning from an analyst over at TD Cowen saying that the DOJ’s major remedies that you just ran through, Adam, are aimed at helping Gen AI providers take market share from Google. To what extent do you think that that is going to be a headline to come out of this that investors can’t help but continue to keep top of mind that this is going to potentially be a result that allows AI competitors to eat Google’s lunch more seamlessly?
03:47 Adam Kovacevich
Well, I think that speaks to a huge tension of the case, which is when this case started and when it was filed several years ago in the beginning of the Trump or the end of the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, it was a narrow case, and it was really just about Google’s search distribution deals with Apple on Samsung devices, things like that. What’s happened is after the Justice Department won the liability phase, they really threw what I call remedy spaghetti at the wall. And they said, look, let’s go for broke here, right? Let’s sort of invite all of our Google’s rivals in and and really ask for aggressive remedies. And that included things like AI, limitations on AI. Well, the fact is the case wasn’t about AI, and Google’s um, you know, behavior was not judged on AI. So what I think the Justice Department is trying to do here is trying to use the liability finding to put handcuffs on Google with respect to AI. But but in the AI space, arguably Google’s behind, right? Uh arguably, you know, they’re behind OpenAI chat chat GPT. And so it kind of speaks to the way in which this case is being used by the government um to to move the goal posts, honestly, to whatever anybody is concerned about uh Google doing. And that’s not really what this case should have be about. That’s not how the courts are supposed to judge it.