More from US v. Google: all the news from the search antitrust showdown

Judge Amit Mehta just wrapped up a long line of questioning about how generative AI should play into the search trial. “We spent a lot of time in this remedies phase talking about AI,” Mehta began. “There’s an argument to be made perhaps that all that is not relevant because it’s not a market that was discussed during the liability phase.” Mehta asked Dahlquist to defend why a tool like Gemini should be considered part of the overall search market, not something separate and new. Dahlquist, in turn, emphasized that AI “is a new search access point. That is a gateway to search.”

DOJ attorney David Dahlquist is laying out the governments’ case for changes that would help “pry open the market to competition” in search. He’s accused Google of providing “milquetoast remedies that it knows will maintain the status quo,” instead mainly arguing in preparation for its appeal.

Closing arguments are starting in US v. Google, the antitrust trial that could determine whether Google is forced to sell its Chrome browser and dramatically change its search business. We’re not in court today, but we’re listening on a dial-in line for this final stage of the trial.

During its Search antitrust trial yesterday, a DOJ attorney produced a document showing that “80 billion of 160 billion ‘tokens’ — snippets of content — after filtering out the material that publishers had opted out of allowing Google to use for training its AI,” according to Bloomberg.

First, Sundar Pichai used Google Plus to explain how the best product usually wins — as an example of a time Google lost. “I think I’m comfortable saying it wasn’t the best product out on the market,” he said. And laughed! A few minutes later, an FTC case against Google’s other terrible social network, Google Buzz, came up as an example of Google being bad for user privacy. Yet another tough day in Google social networking.

Google’s CEO has talked on the stand about Chrome and Chromium, and shouted out RCS and web standards, but he’s also said over and over that if Google is forced to share its search index, search data, and even search results with competitors, it might kill the value of Google Search.

In the Google Search remedies trial, the government is done arguing its case and now Google is getting started. Today’s first witness: CEO Sundar Pichai, who also led the Chrome team at the very beginning. I suspect we’re about to hear a lot about why Chrome exists, why it matters to Google — and why Pichai wants it to stay part of Google.

Testifying in the Google Search antitrust trial yesterday, Chrome general manager Parisa Tabriz said Chrome’s features and functionality owe to its “interdependencies” on other parts of the company, reports Bloomberg. She reportedly said over 90 percent of Chromium code has originated from Google since 2015.

My big question coming into this remedies trial was how serious the government was about making Google divest Chrome. It’s a swing, and seemed like maybe a negotiating tactic. But in opening arguments it became clear that getting Chrome out of Google is very much part of the goal. So far, judge Amit Mehta seems skeptical of the idea, but Jonathan Sallet, a lawyer representing the states, argued that something has to be done with maybe the most-used app on the planet:

I’m here in the DC District Court for the remedies phase of the US v. Google trial, which found Google to be a monopoly in search. David Dahlquist, the lawyer for the Department of Justice, just showed a slide of Google’s “vicious cycle” — Defaults, Searches, Data, Quality, Money — and said he intends to offer a plan to unwind the cycle piece by piece. It’s gonna be an intense next few weeks.