Then complain about the US president forcing Microsoft to do X rather than just preemptively criticizing Microsoft for doing nothing

Have they been doing this? Evidence?

Apathy is not evidence of anything, not even ignorance.

Gemini is a copy of ChatGPT. And ChatGPT was a product invented on top of many previous ideas. The fact that one paper among many was written at Google isn’t relevant to my point.

Google entered the competition in AI products late. And now they will use their power unfairly to try and make it win. When they bundle an AI Chatbot into their existing contracts for Google workspace, they are competing unfairly. When the Chrome browser steers you towards Google properties by default, they are competing unfairly. Etc. Those unfair monopolistic actions let them come into the market years late with a viable competitor to ChatGPT or other products.

And let’s not give them too much credit for transformers. A handful of researchers were paid by Google while they came up with that paper. Google didn’t really do anything to push for it and neither Google leaders nor shareholders cared much about it at the time. Not to mention, transformers themselves were just a continuation of other prior steps in ML, from what I’ve read.

I will preface by saying that someone with Lina Khan is sorely needed; Big Tech and other monopolies have gotten way too Big and seriously need to be reined in.

That said, from all the informed takes I've seen, Lina Khan was seriously... flawed (putting it charitably) in her strategy and tactics. To the extent that some observers wondered if she was deliberately sabotaging the agency just to highlight the need for new, more effective laws. She did have a novel theory of consumer harm, but that requires new legislation to enforce. Instead the way she went about it -- including by flouting due process -- was extremely counter-productive.

That was a big reason she was neither very effective in her goals (other than creating a lot of noise) nor have high political support from any side.

The current set of laws lead to the current situation in my opinion. Enforcement within the current laws means a court case that will take years and span multiple administrations, which gives it a lot of time to be killed. It doesn’t provide enough authority to immediately bring enforcement actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need

/s

Google owns 92% of all "URL bars".

They turned this into "search".

Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.

It's downright evil.

Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.

The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.

They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.

AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.

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"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several?

I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?