Yesterday’s resolution of an antitrust case against Google was years in the making. Leah Nylen breaks down how it affects the company as well as others across the tech landscape. Plus: Is the AI boom a threat to true AI innovation? And why hasn’t Iowa done more to clean up its water?

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A federal judge issued a landmark decision on Tuesday that ordered Alphabet Inc.’s Google to share some of its search data with rivals but declined to break up the company. The 230-page antitrust ruling, which wraps up five years of litigation, yields some obvious winners and losers for the tech industry.

The Winners
Apple. The undeniable victor is the iPhone maker, which not only gets to keep its gravy train of payments from Google for setting its search engine as the default in the Safari browser but also is unburdened by exclusivity so it can make lucrative deals with others. The ruling only requires Apple Inc. to make a few tweaks to its interfaces so users can more easily switch browsers, something it was already thinking about.

Google. It’s hard to read Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling as anything other than a win for the search giant. Google escaped the toughest remedy—a forced sale of its Chrome browser—and the judge watered down the Justice Department’s data-sharing request. In earlier court cases, Google swiftly issued statements attacking the judgments and foretold of ominous harms to consumers. Yet last night’s comments were subdued, with the search giannt promising only to appeal the original decision that found it illegally monopolized the market. That’s as clear a sign as any that Google doesn’t think the remedy will change its business much. Analysts at Morningstar, TD Cowen and Scotiabank reached the same conclusion.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet. Photographer: Damian Lemanski/Bloomberg

Generative AI startups. OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and the like may get a boost from the judge’s muzzling of Google’s Gemini chatbot. The search giant had already started using the same playbook of signing exclusive contracts with key companies like Samsung Electronics Co. to preinstall its artificial intelligence app on new devices. Now Google can’t use its billions of dollars to block startups from those avenues of distribution, as a Perplexity executive alleged at the trial this spring.

Microsoft. The OG tech monopolist was a key complainant against Google at the 2023 trial, offering testimony about how its contracts blocked Microsoft Corp.’s Bing from winning crucial deals with Apple and Samsung. The Redmond, Washington, company was particularly peeved when Google forced it to put the Chrome browser and the Google Search app on its now-defunct Surface Duo. The judge appears to have taken that testimony to heart, ordering Google to unbundle the Play Store from its other apps in future Android contracts.

The Losers
Google’s Gemini. Although the case itself was about search, the remedy puts a leash on the AI product. Google can’t enter exclusive arrangements to distribute Gemini, and any deals can be for only one year—which could give other AI companies a leg up in negotiating with smartphone makers that want to incorporate the technology. Although Judge Mehta sharply limited the data that Google will be required to share with rivals, he required the tech giant provide some of the data it uses to train Gemini.

DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and little search engines. Google dominates search, but smaller engines still exist, several of which told the court that getting search data is their biggest hurdle to growth. DuckDuckGo Chief Executive Officer Gabriel Weinstein and a Yahoo executive both testified that accessing Google’s search data would allow them to improve exponentially. The judge’s ruling, though, sharply cabined the Justice Department’s data-sharing proposal to a one-time peek, which may have limited utility.

The Department of Justice. After five years and millions of dollars spent litigating the case, US antitrust enforcers aren’t walking away with much. The top antitrust official said the agency is “weighing our options,” which is lawyer-speak for considering an appeal. But appeals courts give a lot of deference to trial judges and would be reluctant to second-guess whether a remedy is strong enough.

In Brief

• Treasury yields declined Wednesday after a weaker-than-expected report on hiring.
• President Donald Trump’s campaign to reshape the Federal Reserve gains ground on Thursday with an accelerated Senate confirmation hearing for Stephen Miran.
• Anthropic named the Qatar Investment Authority as a “significant” investor in a financing round that valued the company at $183 billion.

The Cost of AI Progress

Vaswani at the San Francisco headquarters of his startup, Essential AI. Photographer: Christie Hamm Klok for Bloomberg Businessweek

In March 2024 a group of scientists joined a panel to discuss a seven-year-old research paper named after a Beatles song. The event took place at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, where the line to get in snaked around the second floor. About 2,200 people made it into the auditorium or watched from an overflow room, while an additional 10,000 streamed the event online. Those inside the main room snapped photos on their phones; a few even sneaked up to the stage to get better shots. It was about as close as a tech conference can come to Beatlemania.

The paper, “Attention Is All You Need,” describes a novel architecture for artificial intelligence systems known as a transformer. Widely regarded as one of the most influential scientific publications of the 21st century, it’s earned more than 191,000 citations in other papers since its publication almost a decade ago. It serves as the technical foundation for the modern AI boom and is therefore arguably responsible for increasing the value of a handful of tech giants by trillions of dollars, creating some of the most valuable startups of all time and inspiring an eye-watering global construction boom in data centers. At the very least, the transformer has put the “T” in ChatGPT.

The panel was moderated by Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, whose company owes much of its $4.1 trillion valuation to the transformer. For about 40 minutes, he held court with seven of the paper’s eight contributors, who cracked jokes about deep learning and talked up their AI startups amid frequent bursts of applause. As the panel came to a close, Huang presented the paper’s first author with a framed server case. “To Ashish Vaswani,” he read from his scrawled inscription. “You transformed the world.”

Vaswani helped usher in modern AI. But, as Julia Love writes, now he’s wondering if we’re doing it all wrong: An AI Pioneer Worries Big Tech Is Blinding Itself to New Breakthroughs

What’s in the Water

The Tentinger feedlot in Remsen, Iowa, on a summer day. Photograph by Walker Pickering for Bloomberg Businessweek

In the town of Remsen, in Northwest Iowa, Steven Pick spent 34 years working at City Hall. As the city clerk, he rebuilt Remsen’s ball fields and swimming pool and served as president and vice president of the chamber of commerce. He managed a local baseball team, played third base and pitched.

Pick’s proudest endeavor, though, was his determined effort to protect the water supply for Remsen’s 1,600 residents. He’s the first to admit it didn’t succeed. In Iowa, which by some measures has the most polluted water in the US, people who advocate for the environment are widely scorned as enemies of farming. Outside the cities and universities, few dare criticize the state’s $50 billion agricultural industry—the farmers, food processors, tractor makers, chemical companies and ethanol producers that reign supreme in this Kingdom of Corn.

Located 40 miles northeast of Sioux City, Remsen lies in the heart of corn country. From May to October, the area is carpeted with sprawling rows of gold and emerald stalks that disappear over the horizon, checkered by occasional feedlots packed with cows and pigs fattened on local grain. Laced across the fields are streams that feed Remsen’s drinking wells and ultimately the Floyd River, a tributary of the Missouri.

Runoff from fields and feedlots fills Iowa’s waterways with dangerous nitrates, Peter Waldman writes. It would be fixable if not for the political and economic power of Big Ag: Why Iowa Chooses Not to Clean Up Its Polluted Water

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