The rulings holding a pin to the big Google balloon

The verdicts are in, and now the decisions are looming. Only a true optimist would think that Google will emerge unscathed from its recent legal losses.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 18:47, 10 October 2024

Last updated: 18:49, 10 October 2024

Not a good week for Mountain View. Even as the undeniably brilliant Google employee Demis Hassabis secured a joint Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday, that accolade was merely an individual shaft of sunlight through the thickening corporate storm clouds.

The day before a US Federal judge had, in the wonderful words of the Associated Press, "ordered Google to tear down the digital walls shielding its Android app store from competition as punishment for maintaining an illegal monopoly that helped expand the company’s internet empire". 

This means that Google's Play Store for Android will be compelled to distribute app stores made by third parties for download. In turn, apps available on Play will be available on other app stores, meaning they too can offer a good choice, and maybe a better deal for developers.

For those that have been following what we know as "Epic Games vs Google", it's yet another remarkable vindication for Tim Sweeney of Epic and his "Project Liberty". He was the ape who said "no".

Google is of course appealing, yet that wasn't the only tricky response that the company's Lee-Anne Mulholland, Vice President, Regulatory Affairs, had to write this week.

The Epic vs Google ruling turned out to be only a starter course, as late on Tuesday the US Department of Justice filed court papers that for the first time outlined the ways in which Google's business could be broken up, following on from the ruling in August that Google was a search monopolist which used its dominance to crush the competition and snuff out innovation from rivals.

This was only an initial filing, and we'll know on November 20th exactly what steps the DoJ is suggesting. However, a "full range of tools" is under consideration to even the digital playing field, according to the papers. 

Remedies required to "prevent and restrain monopoly maintenance could include contract requirements and prohibitions; non-discrimination product requirements; data and interoperability requirements; and structural requirements".

So that's anything from, and including, splitting off Chrome and/or Android, forcing Google to make available its AI-assisted search features, make available its ad ranking data, and so on. 

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, it's been 40 years since the US government took such action against monopolistic behaviour, yet the thinking outlined in the filing isn't the thinking of the timid and inexperienced. It's not good news for Google.

So once again Mulholland as responder in chief was forced back to her keyboard. 

In a post giving Google's response to the filing, she raised the predictable points. At risk is "security and privacy", being forced to share Google's data with others will leave us, the consumer, wide open to unspecified "bad actors". Then there's innovation in AI, and in particular "American innovation". 

She asserts that hampering Google's efforts in this direction will mean "hobbling emerging business models". Yeah, that's Google's job, so keep your nose out, US government.

It goes on. Hiving off Android and Chrome would "break them", as if they are rare plants that can only grow in certain soil rather than lines of code, and last and not least for us of the publishing world "Google’s innovative ads system has levelled the playing field for small businesses and publishers". 

As we know, Google owns the playing field and a cynic would agree they have certainly "levelled" everything around it - probably not in same the sense of the word that Google uses however. Level is whatever they say it is, because they have all the data.

Before we get carried away, at the time of writing shares in Alphabet, Google's parent company, had fallen less than two per cent following the bad news. That's against a rise of 19 per cent or so over the year. So the market isn't spooked at the moment, likely anticipating further legal moves that make any real change at Google some time away.

I'd like to pose one last question: Do we think that Demis Hassabis would have won his Nobel Prize if he hadn't worked for Google? I can't conceive of a universe in which the answer is "no" and likewise for John M. Jumper who shared the prize. 

The same can be said for Professor Geoffrey Hinton who was joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics this week. He actually quit after a decade at Google's employ to warn about the dangers of AI. Google has largely bought its innovation in.

As a final aside, quite a number of specialist researchers in both physics and chemistry are far from happy that computer scientists have won the Nobel prizes in their disciplines. No opinion on that, but I hope all the advances in machine learning both those spheres of science now enjoy will yield some useful results in the near future.