news

Tencent News "First Line"

Author: Ji Zhenyu Editor: Liu Peng

Recently, a US judge ruled that the Internet search giant Google has a monopoly in online search business. Although Google immediately said it would appeal the ruling, what awaits the giant next will be a hearing on how to reshape Google's business to comply with antitrust regulations.

The hearing will be held in early September. Some discussions about the possible actions that may be taken against Google at this hearing have already leaked. Surprisingly, the "split" plan, which was not originally expected by the outside world, has been put on the table for discussion.

Influenced by this news, Google's stock price fell sharply by more than 3% during trading on August 14, US time. As of the close of the day, Google's stock price fell by 2.35%.

According to people familiar with the matter, splitting up Google's businesses is not an option that is not discussed. In fact, the U.S. Department of Justice, which is the plaintiff in this antitrust case, may strive to promote the split. Under this proposal, the most likely to be affected are the mobile operating system Android and Google's web browser Chrome. In addition, the Department of Justice may also force Google to sell its advertising business AdWords.

Other, less aggressive proposals include requiring Google to share more data with third parties and taking steps to avoid gaining an unfair lead in artificial intelligence products.

In last week's ruling, the position of Google's search business in the search market became a decisive factor in the final judgment. The Department of Justice believes that Google uses its monopoly advantage to control the online search market. Google's parent company Alphabet's 2023 full-year financial report shows that Google's "traffic acquisition costs" reached US$50.886 billion that year, an amount that increased by more than US$5 billion compared to two years ago. Other data show that more than US$26 billion of this was spent on paying third-party companies to ensure that Google's search engine becomes the default search engine, and the annual payment to Apple alone is as high as more than US$20 billion.

After the verdict was announced, the search engine company DuckDuckGo put forward a high-profile plan to deal with Google's monopoly in the search market. The company believes that the government should ban agreements signed between Google search engine and third parties to use Google search as the default search engine, provide users with the option of choosing search engines independently, and inform users how to choose other search engines.

existGenerative AIWith the rising trend, the AI ​​overview function that Google tried in search has also brought business impact to third-party Internet information providers. Through the AI ​​overview function, users can directly view specific web page content information without having to click to open the web page. In addition, Google's practice of capturing third-party data through search for its own artificial intelligence large model training has also been criticized by the outside world as "unfair behavior." Although Google launched a tool last fall allowing third parties to prohibit data from being used in Google's AI training, it does not apply to the AI ​​Overview function.

Although the outside world had expected that under the wave of generative artificial intelligence,ChatGPT、PerplexityWith the efforts of Microsoft and others on Bing search, Google's unbreakable market share in the past decade may be impacted. However, this has not happened yet. According to the latest data from Statcounter, a network traffic data analysis company, Google's search market share will still be as high as over 91% in 2024.