[ Google Issues ] Script of my national radio report yesterday on penalties in the Google antitrust case and what they may mean for Google and everyone else

[Lauren Weinstein]

This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on the
penalties just announced in a Google antitrust case that Google lost,
and what this may mean for Google and everyone else going forward. As
always there may have been some minor wording variations from this
script as I presented the report live on air.

- - -

Well, indeed we now have the judge's penalty decision in that Google
antitrust case that we talked about very recently. And ever since
Google lost that case there's been enormous speculation about what
penalties Google would face. Now I've been clear that I thought some
of the possible penalties in this matter, such as forcing Google to
sell off the Chrome browser or Android, would present enormous privacy
and security problems for potentially billions of users. And I'm not
going to detail that again here now since those are not among the
penalties the judge has ordered in this case.

In fact Google came out of this really quite well, with the judge
putting some conditions on deals Google makes with other firms and
ordering the sharing of some search-related data and the like. Whether
or not that kind of data sharing will represent a privacy problem of
its own isn't really clear yet, but certainly the judge has not
imposed the kinds of penalties that would have created a seismic shift
in the way people around the planet use the Internet, their phones,
and in many ways technology more broadly.

But keep in mind this is NOT the end of the story. In some ways it's
just the beginning of what Google will likely be facing going forward.
This current case can still be appealed, and that seems likely occur.
Google is facing other litigation involving its ad practices, it's
facing other penalties and litigation in Europe.

And frankly, it could be argued that regulators and courts will have
vast new opportunities to battle Google when it comes to Google's AI
practices. And this is likely going to come from all sorts of
directions. From U.S. states, from other U.S. entities, from other
governments around the world. Some of this in the U.S. will relate to
efforts to strip the AI systems of these firms from traditional
"Section 230" protections, and make them fully responsible for the
content that these Large Language Model generative AI systems produce.

Because of the massive amount of hype these firms are using to push
their AI systems, including search AI overviews, chatbots and more,
their desperation to make these enormous expensive systems pay off is
causing them to deploy AI in ways that can be genuinely harmful. We've
talked about a recent teen suicide and a separate murder-suicide where
AI chatbots were reportedly directly involved. Google is now sometimes
pushing students to let it "help" them with their homework by popping
up prompts in the Chrome browser when it thinks they're on a page
relating to schools, and already this is causing problems for schools
who want to prevent cheating on quizzes and tests, because these
"homework help AIs" can also be viewed in many cases simply as
cheating machines.

And now there's word that Google apparently is planning to soon alter
their DEFAULT search experience -- the one you get automatically at
google.com -- to be their horrible, misinformation and error-prone "AI
search experience" instead of traditional search.

It's obvious that AI is going to be the target of governments around
the world at an accelerating pace. Whether any of this will eventually
wipe those grins from the faces of those billionaire Big Tech CEOs
remains to be seen.

AI search systems can be particularly vulnerable to becoming
propaganda machines, because when you're providing AI-created answers
to questions, whether accurate, wrong, or sometimes worst of all
confusingly partly correct, you discourage people from actually going
to sites themselves to see whether those answers seem reasonable,
manipulated, or worse.

And as Google and these other firms try to leash us to them ever more
tightly with their "Don't trust your brain or eyes but trust our AI"
mantras, you can be pretty sure that the controversies we've seen up
to now regarding AI will look like a walk in the park compared with
the enormous battles yet to come.

- - -

L

- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lau...@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
_______________________________________________
google-issues mailing list
https://lists.vortex.com/mailman/listinfo/google-issues