Dallas Locke Lord Partner Brad Weber Quoted by Bloomberg Law, The National Law Journal on Impact of Landmark Antitrust Decision in U.S. v. Google on Big Tech and AI Industry

Dallas Partner Brad Weber, Co-Chair of Locke Lord’s Antitrust Practice Group and Artificial Intelligence Industry Group, was quoted by Bloomberg Law and The National Law Journal regarding the prospective impact of U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s decision in U.S. v. Google, finding that Google has an illegal monopoly in the online search engine market, on other antitrust litigation against big tech companies and its implications to the budding artificial intelligence industry.

Weber explains the decision in the Google case will likely embolden the Department of Justice (DOJ) in similar antitrust cases involving large technology companies and could be used as precedent in the DOJ’s separate digital advertising case against Google, which is scheduled for trial next month in Virginia.

“There’s a lot of overlap between the two cases because the search engine case talks about Google’s market power in advertising and how [Google] was so dominant in the search [engine] market, where over 90% of consumers use Google instead of Bing or other search engines,” he says. “…[T]hat allowed Google to charge higher prices for advertising, [which is one of the direct issues] in the Virginia case.”

As for what’s next, a hearing already has been set by Judge Mehta for Sept. 6 to outline various remedies that will likely have very important implications for the development of AI and AI search tools, Weber notes.

“If [Judge Mehta] believes that access to Google’s search data gives Google an unfair advantage in the development of AI technologies, Mehta may issue an order that requires Google to make these datasets available to other competitors that require the information for developing their own competing AI technologies,” he says.

Read the full Bloomberg Law article and the full The National Law Journal article (subscriptions may be required).