In a contentious legal defeat in August, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google illegally monopolized the internet search market. That assertion was not true at the time, and it certainly is not true now.
As artificial intelligence rapidly changes how companies compete in the internet search market, Google and its competitors are in a race to effectively integrate AI into their search platforms. For its part, Google searches now populate AI overviews in easily digestible responses that do not require that information be gathered through additional clickthroughs.
Now other competing applications are bursting onto the scene. Early last year, Microsoft added Bing Chat as a built-in feature of its search engine Bing. Late last month, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Search to create a more natural way for consumers to search the internet in a user friendly and conversational way.
Unlike Google Search, ChatGPT Search is only available at a price of $20 per month—for now. But OpenAI intends to make the search feature free, which will only inject more competition into a rapidly changing internet search market.
Artificial intelligence is a gamechanger in the internet search market because it offers users simple, efficient, and effective summaries instead of an assortment of links consumers can use to answer those questions themselves. Pair those advantages with the fact that OpenAI already operates one of the most popular apps in the world with over 200 million weekly active users, and the answer to who will win the race to the cutting edge of internet search is an open question.
How Google competes in this rapidly evolving market is still to be seen, but if OpenAI’s ChatGPT were to upend the market leading position of Google Search, that would not be unprecedented.
In fact, upending competitors in the search market is exactly how Google became so popular. With its now obsolete method of categorizing the web, Yahoo once dominated the internet search market. That was until Google introduced a fundamentally different, more user-friendly, model focused on streamlined and efficient algorithms.
Just as Google out-competed and out-innovated competitors like Yahoo to gain its popularity, generative artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI could do the same to Google. Alternatively, both companies could add value to consumers as they settle into their own market niches.
Regardless, courts blatantly err when they prematurely rule that Google has monopolized an internet search market that is currently undergoing significant changes. Innovation naturally leads to new and different kinds of market competition arrangements that benefit consumers. Just as the horse and buggy gave way to cars and how iPhones made Blackberry phones obsolete, technological change marches on.
Rather than arbitrarily assuming insurmountable market power is unbreakable and that consumers are always harmed anywhere there is market concentration, regulators should re-examine the search market as AI further changes how consumers use and search the internet.
Trey Price is a policy analyst with the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, visit us at www.TheAmericanConsumer.Org or follow us on X @ConsumerPal.