Google's flagship program may have sustained a major blow last 5 August after a judge found its search and ad businesses violated antitrust law.
The ruling, made by the District of Columbia's Judge Amit Mehta, sided with the US Justice Department and a group of states in a set of cases alleging the tech giant abused its dominance in online search.
"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," Mehta wrote in his ruling.
The findings, if upheld, could outlaw contracts that for years all but assured Google's dominance.
Google said it planned to appeal the decision, which it said "recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available."
Judge Mehta ruled that Google violated antitrust law in the markets for "general search" and "general search text" ads, which are the ads that appear at the top of the search results page.
He said Google was not liable in the market for "search advertising" because it did not hold a monopoly there.
The decision is a huge win for the Justice Department and could have giant implications for some of the other big names in the tech world.
That's because Apple, Amazon, and Meta are defending themselves against a series of other federal- and state-led antitrust suits, some of which make similar claims.
The scrutiny is part of a wide-ranging effort by the Biden administration to rein in what it views as anticompetitive behavior across a number of industries, from healthcare to groceries to tech.
The global search industry is also in the midst of a massive shift as companies increasingly add generative AI responses to their services.
Google has added its AI Overviews feature to its standard search service, providing users with generative AI-powered answers to their queries that summarize content found on various websites in a dedicated window about the search engine's standard website links.
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