Google was in the news late last year for an ad monopoly. The Department of Justice in the USA has taken Google to trial over its anti-competitive practices in the advertisement industry, giving preferential treatment to its own tools over those of competitors.
One potential penalty - proposed by the DOJ prior to the trial - is that Google be forced to sell off Google Chrome or Android. Splitting up these "key assets" would be the only way to fix the problem of Google's monopoly, in the DOJ's opinion.
OpenAI's ChatGPT chief, Nick Turley, was asked to testify by the DOJ in the aforementioned trial against Google. When asked in court (if I'm interpreting correctly), he was asked if OpenAI would be willing to buy Chrome, and the answer was "yes, we would, as would many other parties".
Controlling the most-used browser in the browser would be a mouth-watering prospect for any company, more so for a company struggling to break into the mobile AI assistants market. While ChatGPT managed to score itself as Apple's first choice of GenAI, Google's Gemini has a strong foothold in the Android scene.
Turley also expressed concerns that Google controls both the Google Play Store, Google Chrome, and Google search, which are the major access points for users to discover AI assistants.
On the other hand, if OpenAI were to be able to integrate Chrome and ChatGPT together, they believe they can offer a "really incredible experience", showing users what an "AI-first experience looks like".
The idea of the world's biggest browser going AI-first is... concerning. Presumably, the AI integration is going to see everything on the screen in order to provide all the AI-related features. Unless OpenAI intends to provide AI models that run on your computer, your on-screen information will be sent to OpenAI's servers for AI inference. Considering how many people dump loads of personal information into AI chatbots anyway, is the AI industry just another way to collect personal data? With browser integration, it would cross over the line from data collection by consent into data collection by default. We could descend deeper into the privacy nightmare that we're already slipping down, with always a shiny new feature to justify gobbling more user data.
Google argues that its products are just the obvious first choice for users due to quality, and that forcing users to use alternatives could make it tough for them to reach Google's services.
So essentially, "no we don't restrict competitors, but our competitors are going to restrict us."
This superior quality of Google services and the meritocratic state of the tech industry must be why Google is paying Samsung to exclusively pre-install Gemini on its devices, having Samsung's Bixby take a backseat. Apparently other companies - Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and Perplexity - had also approached Samsung with similar exclusive pre-installation offers and they chose Google's.
Google said it has amended the contract to allow Samsung to offer other AI apps on its devices, and these communications were dated shortly before the trial. Internal documents presented in the trial showed that Google "was considering more restrictive distribution agreements that would have required partners to preinstall Gemini alongside Search and Chrome".
This contract between Google and Samsung came into effect in January 2024, after similar arrangements with Apple, Samsung, and other companies for Google Search were found to have been violating antitrust law. These default placement deals are also likely to be banned as a result of the trial, with Google pushing for this to be the only punishment.