By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
All right, Google and the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust trial coming to a close, attorneys making their closing arguments as the search giant fights to keep its Chrome business nine months after a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the search engine market. Our finance is Dan Hali joins us now. Dan, the judge overseeing this case, uh, questioning the future of search engines amid the rise of AI?
01:02 Dan Hali
Yeah, Josh, Judge Mehta, he’s the, uh, the same judge that, uh, sided with the DOJ originally, saying that Google maintains an illegal monopoly in the search industry. He’s also now going to decide what happens to Google, uh, whether or not they get to hold on to their Chrome browser, whether or not they have to share some of their data with competitors, and whether or not they have to stop doing exclusive agreements with the likes of Apple and Samsung. So let’s just kind of break that down. The first part, Chrome would be a dramatic change for Google. The base search on Chrome is obviously Google search and Chrome is the most used browser in the world. So if Google loses that, uh, and the, uh, Google is no longer the base search engine for Chrome, where some other company snaps it up, that could give rivals a big advantage. On the other side, when it comes to those exclusive agreements with the likes of Apple and Samsung, it would hurt both Google and Apple and Samsung to a degree. Basically, Google gets placement as the default search engine in Apple Safari and other services. In return, Apple gets $20 billion a year that goes into its services revenue, which is a nice chunk of change when it comes to the annual services revenue. So that would also be an issue overall. And then Google says that sharing its data would just give more advantage to its competitors. But this all comes as you’ve alluded to, is there’s this backdrop of AI search that’s kind of exploding now with, you know, the start of chat GPT, uh, in 2022, excuse me, 2023, moving on throughout. And, you know, we have chat GPT has its own search engine now, perplexity is a search engine. Uh, we have anthropic and Claude that can do real-time search as well. Uh, Google isn’t sitting down, uh, sitting on the sidelines though. They have their AI overviews as well as their new AI mode, which is more or less a version of chat GPT or arrival to chat GPT. But there’s also concerns that Google may be losing some of its market share. There was a portion of this trial where Apple SVP Eddy Cue came in and said, look, we saw the first decline in search queries in Safari in April. And that’s, that was a first for them. Obviously, the fact that Google is the original search or the default search engine for Safari means that they saw a decline in Google search as well. But Google kind of shot back and said, look, we’re seeing increases in Google search overall still, including on iOS devices. So it’s going to be interesting to see how this all turns out.
06:15 Speaker A
All right, we’ll be watching. Dan, thank you.