Government & Policy

Google to receive punishment for search monopoly by next August, says judge

Comment

Sundar Pichai
Image Credits: Mateusz Wlodarczyk/NurPhoto / Getty Images

A federal judge says he will deliver a punishment in Google’s antitrust case by August 2025, according to The New York Times, after ruling earlier this month that Google had abused its monopoly power over the search industry.

Judge Amit P. Mehta established a timeline for the remedies phase of Google’s antirust trial during a hearing in Washington, D.C. on Friday, the outcome of which could upend how people find information on the internet. Prosecutors have until the end of the year to submit their proposals, which could take aim at Google’s billion-dollar payments to Apple in exchange for priority placement, or potentially order Google to sell off parts of its business.

A lot can change in one year, however, especially given the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Republican and Democratic donors are both reportedly asking the candidates to shake up America’s tough regulatory environment. The outcome of Google Search’s antitrust case could be on the negotiating table in those discussions.

More TechCrunch

Supermaven, an AI coding assistant, has raised $12 million in a funding round that had participation from OpenAI and Perplexity co-founders.

AI coding assistant Supermaven raises cash from OpenAI and Perplexity co-founders

Arjun Vora and Tito Goldstein were working on the corporate side of Uber when they realized that HR software largely wasn’t built to manage hourly staff. Many hourly workers lacked…

TeamBridge, founded by former Uber execs, raises $28M to build HR software for hourly workers

The US Food and Drug Administration Monday published approval for sleep apnea detection on the Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Watch Ultra 2. The green light comes four…

Apple Watch sleep apnea detection gets FDA approval

Featured Article

Apple AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation review

I can’t recall another consumer electronics product category becoming a commodity as quickly as Bluetooth earbuds. Apple’s AirPods played a key role in that growth, of course, recapturing a kind of excitement not seen in consumer music tech since the original iPod. AirPods’ fundamentals haven’t changed much in the eight…

Apple AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation review

Myntra, India’s largest fashion e-commerce platform, is trialling a four-hour delivery service in four Indian cities, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, a dramatic acceleration from its standard…

Myntra bets on 4-hour delivery amid India’s quick commerce boom

AWS today announced that it is transitioning OpenSearch, its open source fork of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux Foundation with the launch of the very…

AWS brings OpenSearch under the Linux Foundation umbrella

Insight Partners is reportedly on the cusp of on more than $10 billion in capital commitments for its 13th fund, per the FT.  The FT report notes that two of…

Insight Partners is closing in on a whopping $10B+ new fund

The Port of Seattle released a statement Friday confirming that it was targeted by a ransomware attack. The attack occurred on August 24, with the Port (which also operates the…

Port of Seattle shares ransomware attack details

A decade after the wildly popular game Flappy Bird disappeared, an organization calling itself The Flappy Bird Foundation announced plans to “re-hatch the official Flappy Bird® game.” But this morning,…

Flappy Bird’s creator disavows ‘official’ new version of the game

Platforms to connect apps that wouldn’t normally talk to each other have been around for a minute (see: Zapier). But they have not gotten dramatically simpler to use if you’re…

DryMerge promises to connect apps that normally don’t talk to each other — and when it works, it’s great

Featured Article

Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst’s indie band, Good Kid, is almost as successful as his AI company

Nick Frosst, the co-founder of $5.5 billion Canadian AI startup Cohere, has been a musician his whole life. He told TechCrunch that once he started singing, he never shut up. That’s still true today. In addition to his full-time job at Cohere, Frosst is also the front man of Good…

Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst’s indie band, Good Kid, is almost as successful as his AI company

Blockchain technology is all about decentralization and virtualization. So it’s a little ironic that humans love to come together in person at big blockchain events. Such was the case last…

A walk through the crypto jungle at Korea Blockchain Week

I have a guilty pleasure, and it’s not that I just rewatched “Glee” in its entirety (yes, even the awful later seasons), or that I have read an ungodly amount…

The LinkedIn games are fun, actually

It’s looking increasingly likely that OpenAI will soon alter its complex corporate structure. Reports earlier this week suggested that the AI company was in talks to raise $6.5 billion at…

OpenAI could shake up its nonprofit structure next year

Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies. 

Every fusion startup that has raised over $300M

Netflix has never quite cracked the talk show formula, but maybe it can borrow an existing hit from YouTube. According to Bloomberg, the streamer is in talks with BuzzFeed to…

‘Hot Ones’ could add some heat to Netflix’s live lineup

Alex Parmley has been thinking about building his latest company, ORNG, since he was working on his last company, Phood.  Launched in 2018, Phood was a payments app that let…

Why ORNG’s founder pivoted from college food ordering to real-time money transfer

Lawyers representing Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX CEO and co-founder who was convicted of fraud and money laundering late last year, are seeking a new trial. Following crypto exchange FTX’s collapse,…

Sam Bankman-Fried appeals conviction, criticizes judge’s ‘unbalanced’ decisions

OpenAI this week unveiled a preview of OpenAI o1, also known as Strawberry. The company claims that o1 can more effectively reason through math and science, as well as fact-check…

OpenAI previews its new Strawberry model

There’s something oddly refreshing about starting the day by solving the Wordle. According to DeepWell DTx, there’s a scientific explanation for why our brains might feel just a bit better…

DeepWell DTx receives FDA clearance for its therapeutic video game developer tools

Soundiiz is a free third-party tool that builds portability tools through existing APIs and acts as a translator between the services.

These two friends built a simple tool to transfer playlists between Apple Music and Spotify, and it works great

In early 2018, VC Mike Moritz wrote in the FT that “Silicon Valley would be wise to follow China’s lead,” noting the pace of work at tech companies was “furious”…

This is how bad China’s startup scene looks now

Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford professor many deem the “Godmother of AI,” has raised $230 million for her new startup, World Labs, from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures.…

Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs comes out of stealth with $230M in funding

Bolt says it has settled its long-standing lawsuit with its investor Activant Capital. One-click payments startup Bolt is settling the suit by buying out the investor’s stake “after which Activant…

Fintech Bolt is buying out the investor suing over Ryan Breslow’s $30M loan

The rise of neobanks has been fascinating to witness, as a number of companies in recent years have grown from merely challenging traditional banks to being massive players in and…

Dave and Varo Bank execs are coming to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

OpenAI released its new o1 models on Thursday, giving ChatGPT users their first chance to try AI models that pause to “think” before they answer. There’s been a lot of…

First impressions of OpenAI o1: An AI designed to overthink it

Featured Article

Investors rebel as TuSimple pivots from self-driving trucks to AI gaming

TuSimple, once a buzzy startup considered a leader in self-driving trucks, is trying to move its assets to China to fund a new AI-generated animation and video game business. The pivot has not only puzzled and enraged several shareholders, but also threatens to pull the company back into a legal…

Investors rebel as TuSimple pivots from self-driving trucks to AI gaming

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week…

Shrinking teams, warped views, and risk aversion in this week’s startup news

Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator will expand the number of cohorts it runs each year from two to four starting in 2025, Bloomberg reported Thursday, and TechCrunch confirmed today.…

Y Combinator expanding to four cohorts a year in 2025

Telegram has had a tough few weeks. The messaging app’s founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in late August and later released on a €5 million bail in France, charged with…

Telegram CEO Durov’s arrest hasn’t dampened enthusiasm for its TON blockchain