A JUDGE HAS BRANDED GOOGLE A MONOPOLIST, BUT AI MAY BRING ABOUT QUICKER CHANGE IN INTERNET SEARCH

A federal judge has branded Google as a ruthless monopolist bent on suffocating it competitors. But how do you go about creating alternatives to a search engine that’s synonymous with internet exploration?

It’s a process that may take years to unfold as Google appeals the landmark decision issued this week by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.

And with that kind of time frame looming, the forces of technological upheaval may make the exercise moot.

The rise of artificial intelligence may reshape the landscape more quickly and profoundly than any judge ever could. The way consumers navigate the internet is more likely to be affected by advances in AI products — such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s own Gemini — before a nearly 4-year-old case brought by the U.S. Justice Department is finally resolved.

Even so, Mehta’s 277-page ruling creates challenges for Google that company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin probably didn’t envision when they set out to revolutionize internet search while attending Stanford University as graduate students.

They eventually dropped out to start a Silicon Valley company in 1998 that adopted “Don’t Be Evil” as a motto that also was meant to serve as its corporate conscience.

Page and Brin, who remain the controlling shareholders of Google’s corporate parent Alphabet Inc., also cast their cuddly startup as a crusader for technology that would be far better than the products coming out of Microsoft, the industry’s reigning kingpin at the time. Microsoft’s dominance of personal computer software and anticompetitive tactics during the 1990s spurred another Justice Department case that ended up hobbling Microsoft and helped make it easier for Google to build its lead in search and then expand into maps, cloud computing, email (Gmail), web browsers (Chrome) and video (YouTube).