A federal judge has stated that he will issue a sentence in Google’s antitrust lawsuit by August 2025, after deciding earlier this month that Google had misused its monopolistic power in the search market.
During a Friday hearing in Washington, D.C., Judge Amit P. Mehta set a timeframe for the remedies phase of Google’s antitrust trial, which could change how consumers obtain information on the internet, according to The New York Times.
Prosecutors have until the end of the year to present ideas, which may target Google’s billion-dollar payments to Apple in exchange for priority placement or require Google to sell off sections of its business.
Prosecutors did not specify the remedy they will recommend, but Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist stated that it should be thorough and take into account how Google intends to integrate artificial intelligence into search.
Last month, Judge Mehta deemed Google a monopoly in online search. He said that Google had developed and cemented its more than 90% share of the search business through exclusive agreements with companies such as Apple to highlight Google rather than other search engines.
Newsng understands that the ruling on how to fix Google’s monopoly may establish a precedent for future federal antitrust cases against Amazon, Apple, and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
In recent years, regulators have sued the corporations on charges that they established monopolies that influenced public debate, commerce, and entertainment.
“The world has changed since discovery closed two years ago,” Judge Mehta said, adding that Google and Microsoft have added A.I. into their search and that OpenAI’s chatbot is being used for search.
Newsng gathered that proposed remedies might include restrictions on partnerships involving Google’s search engine on mobile devices, as well as the company’s dissolution.
The Department of Justice is considering requesting a separation of Google, separating search from businesses such as its Chrome browser and Android operating system.
Judge Mehta will consider remedies, including a probe into penalties and hearings.
We earlier reported that Apple has opted to use Google’s AI chips, known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), to train its artificial intelligence models, bypassing Nvidia’s highly sought-after GPUs.
