Predicting the future can be fun, but you get the sense Judge Amit Mehta wasn’t having much of it in his ruling that declared the long-awaited remedies in the Google antitrust case. Although the case centered around how Google achieved its dominance in search over the past 20 years, Mehta also considered what’s to come, specifically the emergence of AI chatbots like Gemini as go-to information portals for large numbers of people.

That’s important, especially to people in the media, many of whom were disappointed that the remedies weren’t harsher. While Mehta discarded industry-altering solutions like forcing Google to sell Chrome or Android, the ruling does recognize AI assistants as core distribution infrastructure in the media ecosystem. They may be a different animal from search engines, but Mehta writes that there’s enough overlap that the courts should regard them similarly: “…the use cases for GSEs [General Search Engines] and GenAI chatbots ‘are not identical but they do overlap in a number of places’ like ‘a Venn diagram’.”

That recognition is a significant step toward building a future AI ecosystem that works for everyone. There are of course myriad lawsuits and licensing deals between media companies and AI companies, and the ruling is a signal that the courts will treat........

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