End of Chrome Means AI has Arrived

Anti-monopoly regulations against a tech company usually mean their technology is about to be replaced, anyway

The Justice Department indicated this week that it has finally decided to crack down on Google’s search monopoly and may be requiring that the company sell off its Chrome browser division. It’s an “unbundling” that reminds me of a similar effort against Microsoft back in 1999, when the government demanded that tech behemoth Microsoft separate its then seemingly dominant Explorer browser from the Windows operating system. Or even the one back in 1982, when the government broke up AT&T, which had a monopoly on what later became known as “land lines.”

What these big tech breakups have in common is not that they protect consumers or promote industry competition in some important way — they’re usually too late for that. Rather, it’s they they are all leading indicators of the imminent obsolescence of the technologies they seek to regulate. In other words, once a technology faces anti-monopoly regulation, chances are the technology is already over and about to be replaced, anyway.

The 1982 breakup of AT&T occurred at the dawn of the cellular era, the same year that Motorola came out with the first truly consumer-grade mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X that we now affectionately call “the brick.” AT&T only returned as the name and logo on a re-branded Cingular network.

The 1999 action against Microsoft was brought by a group of states attorneys generals who feared that Microsoft’s dominance as a the default operating system shipped with most computers would give them the leverage to push everyone to use their Explorer browser. (It did.) Microsoft argued that the browser should be thought of as just be one more “window” on a machine, and not even a separate application (much as we use our browsers today). But, whatever the company’s anti-competitive practices may have been, the case against Microsoft only came after its browser dominance had been challenged by a new technology: Google’s search function. While browsers are still a source of revenue for the companies who make them, Google’s rise made Explorer’s dominance all but irrelevant. What really mattered about the Internet was not which window we used to view it, but which search engine would choose the sites we actually landed on.

Today’s efforts to pull in Google would have been welcome a decade ago, right around the time the company shed it’s “don’t do evil” moniker in favor of mining our data and selling it to advertisers. Today, Google’s search business feels a bit besides the point. To be sure, it’s appropriate to cheer on any and all anti-monopoly efforts in a digital landscape where size trumps competition. A monopsomy like Amazon can control both consumers and vendors, leading to a world (as my friend Cory Doctorow likes to point out) where your toaster could refuse to toast the wrong brand of bread, or your hearing aid could block out music you haven’t paid for.

But what’s most interesting to me about these regulatory efforts is how they seem to occur just as the Next Big Thing is coming over the horizon. And this, more than anything substantive about artificial intelligence, is giving me pause. Until now, I haven’t been taking AI so very seriously. It’s great at video special effects and imitating human writing. But coming so soon after the recent hype cycles of crypto, NFTs, and the metaverse, it was hard not to see the AI boom as yet another attempt to keep investment dollars in Silicon Valley - a way to make up for disasters like Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX debacle.

Federal regulators’ belated targeting of Google got me asking, is Google still a monopoly? And even if they are, has their reign come to an end? Most of my early adopter friends and I are already using apps like Perplexity for search, and other AI platforms for research trailheads. Try them, if you haven’t. We are finally at the place where instead of “Googling” something by typing a query into a search box, we can talk to an app on our phone and get and actual answer. We don’t need to entertain visions of AI taking over the world to accept that the next way of doing the Internet is here. Google may be to Perplexity or Claude, what Yahoo was to Google. (And Yahoo was accused of being a monopoly in its day, too!)

My industry contacts tell me Google is intentionally holding back its own AI deployment for fear of generating more regulatory attention. But that’s not how the Google we’ve all known (and not exactly loved) for the past couple of decades behaves when it knows it’s on top. No, I believe Google’s position as the dominant force in the Silicon Valley, and the search engine’s centrality to our experience of the Internet, are finally over. What worries me is that — given the kinds of companies, people, and technologies that comprise the AI sector — we may look back on the era Google dominance as the good ol’ days.