by Christine Mass at Reclaim the Net
AI now stands center stage in the DOJ’s case, portrayed as the next frontier Google plans to quietly conquer with a monopoly’s muscle.
It’s remedy season in the DC antitrust circus, and Google is back under the federal magnifying glass, twitching like a kid with a guilty conscience and a browser history to hide. The Justice Department has now entered the part of its case where the talk gets less abstract and more surgical; cutting tools, structural remedies, divestitures, bloodletting. And they’ve got Alphabet in their crosshairs.
This week, the government’s lawyers turned their attention to a fresh boogeyman: artificial intelligence. As if the idea of a company that already owns the rails of search, browsers, operating systems, and half the ad economy wasn’t quite threatening enough, DOJ attorney David Dahlquist warned that Google is now stapling AI to its empire like a new wing on a haunted mansion.
“This court’s remedy should be forward-looking and not ignore what is on the horizon,” he warned.
Meaning: don’t let the same monopoly that buried search competition in the backyard get a head start programming your toaster’s thoughts.
According to the DOJ,…
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