Browser Wars: The Rise of AI

Last year, after a US district court judge found that Google had illegally monopolized the market for online search, the Department of Justice and state attorneys general proposed a range of remedies, including requiring Google to divest from its Web browser, Chrome. With over 66 percent of the global browser market, Chrome far outpaces competitors like Apple’s Safari (which has around 18 percent of the market) and Microsoft’s Edge (5 percent); in turn, this dominance reinforces the supremacy of its default search engine, Google Search, which commands nearly 90 percent of the worldwide search market. (Mathew Ingram wrote about the various antitrust cases facing Google and other tech titans in this newsletter last week.)

This week, during the second week of the remedy phase of the trial, the Department of Justice said that Google’s search monopoly gives it an unfair advantage in artificial intelligence development. Prosecutors argued that the company’s ability to leverage its vast user data repository and extensive search index to train its AI tools reinforces its dominance and creates barriers to competition. As such, the government is pursuing structural remedies that could prevent Google from consolidating power in the emerging AI sector, including potential mandates to share search data with competitors. Google, for its part, argues that the AI market is already highly competitive and that its rivals are thriving without access to its proprietary data.