Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Give us the snapshot of the business today. Oh yeah. Also, by the way, the federal government decided they were a monopoly and then decided not to do anything about it because of AI. Between the time when we shipped our Alphabet episode and here with our Google AI episode, or our Part II and Part III for those who prefer simpler naming schemes, there was a US versus Google antitrust case. The judge first ruled that Google was a monopoly in internet search, and then did not come up with any material remedies. There are some, but I would call them immaterial. They did not need to spin off Chrome and they did not need to stop sending tens of billions of dollars to Apple and others. In other words, yes, Google’s a monopoly and the cost of doing anything about that would have too many downstream consequences on the ecosystem. So we’re just going to let them keep doing what they’re doing. One of the reasons that the judge cited of why they weren’t going to really take these actions is because of the race in AI. That because tens of billions of dollars of funding have gone into companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Perplexity, Google essentially has this new war to fight and we’re going to leave it to the free market to do its thing where it creates viable competition on its own, and we’re not going to hamstring Google. Personally, I think this argument is a little bit silly. None of these AI companies are generating net income, and just because they’ve raised a huge amount of money, it doesn’t mean that will last forever. They’ll all burn through their existing cash in a pretty short period of time. If the spigots ever dry up, Google doesn’t have any self-sustaining competition right now, whether in their old search business or in AI. It is all dependent on people believing that the opportunity is so large that they keep pouring tens of billions of dollars into these competitors. Plenty of other folks have made the glib comment, but there’s merit to it of, hey, as flatfooted as Google was when ChatGPT happened, if the outcome of this is they avoid a Microsoft-level distraction and damage to their business from a US federal court monopoly judgment, worth it.…

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