How Google skirted an antitrust breakup. Thank AI. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Novosafo.

Welcome to our TechBites week-in-review episode.

This week, we got a major decision in a federal antitrust case against Google.

We saw the Trump family take public their latest digital token.

And we learned about AI-generated angst gripping Silicon Valley.

Let's begin with the Google antitrust case over its search

business. It ended this week with a punishment far short of what the government sought. Google

could have been forced to sell off its Chrome browser or stop paying Apple and others to make Google

the default search engine. Instead, a federal judge said all the company has to do is share some of its search

data with rivals. Natasha Mascaranos, a reporter at the information, says the outcome is tied

to the rise of artificial intelligence. You see companies like OpenAIs chat GPT, like perplexity,

really try and take over Google's, you know's search business. And so to me, this is

really a response to the success of AI in the market. The fact that a relatively unknown product

from two years ago really can fast forward to become the reason, or one of the reasons at least,

that Google did not have to break up.

That's a huge statement on the power that startups have in the market, but also, you know, going forward, I think,

really suggests that the law sees these companies as a significant threat to Google.

And so they believe it's enough to not make them break up.

And in fact, the judge talked about that quite a bit in his very lengthy decision, that

artificial intelligence has really completely brought in a new ingredient and complicated

factors in ways that could not be anticipated since the trial first began, you know, since

the government brought charges back in 2020, which seems

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