As many of you know, Google has lost the trial regarding its search monopoly and has been waiting for remedies in that case. Well, they have been finalized now, CNBC reports .
Google lost this trial last year, but it took some time for everything to wrap up. Back in September this year, Judge Amit Mehta ruled against more severe consequences for Google , as some of you probably know.
Judge Amit Mehta decided not to force Google to sell Google’s Chrome browser, for example. However, the company was ordered to share its search data with competitors, amongst other things.
Google’s search antitrust remedies have been finalized
Mehta, on Friday, shared some additional details on that ruling. In one of the filings, he wrote: “The age-old saying ‘the devil is in the details’ may not have been devised with the drafting of an antitrust remedies judgment in mind, but it sure does fit.”
He wrote that Google can’t enter into any deal like the one it had with Apple “unless the agreement terminates no more than one year after the date it is entered.” It’s not a secret at this point that Google paid Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine on the Safari browser across Apple’s portfolio (iPhones, iPads, and Macs).
Just to be clear, that includes artificial intelligence too, and any “application, software, service, feature, tool, functionality, or product” that involves ganAI or large language models.
A technical committee for Google’s data-sharing is coming
Judge Amit Mehta also laid out requirements on the makeup of a technical committee that will determine with whom Google has to share its data. They need to be “experts in some combination of software engineering, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, economics, behavioral science, and data privacy and data security.”
He did mention that no committee member can have a conflict of interest. What does that mean? Well, for example, if a person worked for Google or any of its competitors in the last six months, that person cannot be a member of the committee.
That committee will get access to “Google’s source code and algorithms, subject to a confidentiality agreement.” Google is required to share some of the raw search interaction data it uses to train its ranking and AI systems, but not the actual algorithms.
