The name Google is synonymous with online searches, but over the years the company has grown beyond search and now builds multiple consumer products, including software like Gmail, Chrome, Maps, Android, and hardware like the Pixel smartphones, Google Home, and Chromebooks. Its name can also be found on internet services such as Google Fi, Flights, Checkout, and Google Fiber. Here is all of the latest news about one of the most influential tech companies in the world.
Now subscribers can ask the AI assistant to provide calendar summaries on a daily basis or generate a summary of an event after it takes place.
Google gave us room for infinite email. What did we get? Infinite email.
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But it’s still a big phone.
Google’s new feature in Labs will create the visualizations to “help bring financial data to life for questions on stocks and mutual funds,” according to a blog post. You can ask Google a follow-up question, too, and “AI Mode understands what to research for you.”
Here’s a video of the feature, from Google’s post:
Google is rolling out a new Gemini AI-powered feature to users with eligible Google Workspace or Google AI plans that pops up a “Catch me up” shortcut to go over recent edits in Google Docs, as well as comments on other types of files, complete with a warning that “Gemini may display inaccurate info.”
It’s supposed to roll out over the next couple of weeks, providing either a high-level summary across all of your files in the sidebar or overviews of changes to a specific file via a new activity indicator.
After launching Photoshop for iPhone in February, a beta Android app is now available to download via Google Play. Much like its iOS counterpart, Photoshop for Android includes many features from the desktop version, including layers, masks, brushes, and Firefly generative AI tools, but with a UI optimized for mobile devices.
Adobe says all features are free to use while the app is in beta, and that more are “coming soon.”
We knew the Phone 3 was launching in July, but now we know exactly when: 1PM ET on July 1st, which is about as early in the month as we could have hoped for. Not long to wait now for what the company considers its first true flagship.
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The Financial Times reports that parent company Alphabet has proposed to spend $500 million over 10 years altering its compliance structure, in a bid to satisfy shareholders who’d sued over the company’s repeated exposure to antitrust investigations. A judge still needs to approve the settlement, which would see Google establish a new regulatory committee within its executive board among other changes.
We’re at the end of a day-long set of closing arguments, concluding with one final request to the judge from DOJ attorney David Dahlquist to “please seize this moment in time” and order Google to change how it runs search. Judge Mehta thanks everyone for dealing with a “challenging schedule” for the trial and says, “we’ll get back to you as soon as we can,” and with that, the remedies trial portion of US v. Google is officially done.
Thank you for staying, someone whispers right next to the conference line just before things go silent — pretty sure it’s not directed at those of us listening in, but I can always dream. For now, we’ll be awaiting a ruling later this year.
The company is giving 25 Pixel Superfans a chance to attend its pre-launch event in London on June 27th, according to a message sent to Superfans on Friday.
At its “Pixel Penthouse,” Google will offer up a sneak peek at its next-gen devices and features, which will likely include the Pixel 10 and maybe even its new buds, smartwatch, and tablet, too.
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Mehta briefly asks how Google would recommend forming a committee that could handle all the specifics of whatever remedy is proposed, as suggested by the DOJ. Google’s attorney complains any committee could end up simply letting the DOJ — and the executive branch in general — control how the deal gets interpreted. “That delegation of authority, I submit, is a violation of due process.” Schmidtlein also brings up how broad the remit of the committee would be, covering everything from privacy to identifying competitors.
Unspoken here: the Trump administration is no fan of Google, and this deal — in Google’s interpretation — would give it a huge amount of power over the company.
We’re wrapping up final discussions about some of the more obscure remedies, and Google briefly references the issue of advertisers gaming the system if they’re provided search data. “There’s lots of problems with this,” Google’s attorney says, including significant privacy problems.
Mehta’s going through a final round of remedies and asking for explanations. First up: a proposed ban on self-preferencing. Government attorney explains it’s focused on search in relation to the Play Store, on-device AI, and a few other products. “Does this mean that, say, let’s say tomorrow Google launches a new product that is... Gemini... Super-Gemini. Do you mean to say if Google launched Super-Gemini, they couldn’t use Google Search to ground it?” Attorney seems to suggest banning something like that might be reasonable, though he equivocates. He says if there’s “a better way to draft” the statute, “we’re all ears.”
Moving on from Chrome acquisitions, we’re in the final section, starting with the state attorney. Michael Schwartz is arguing for an education campaign fund that would address “habit, inertia, and brand recognition” barriers that prevent rivals from attracting users and competing with Google. Mehta asks some practical questions: how much money should be put into the fund, and who decides what the campaign to make people aware of alternatives looks like? The attorney says at a high level, it would be Mehta — who doesn’t seem thrilled about that. “I assure you, I am not qualified to tell you what is a good marketing campaign and what is not,” he says.
Schwartz says a committee could handle the details; for now, he offers a somewhat muddled explanation of how much money Google might need to contribute, reaching up to nine figures. Mehta asks if the whole idea is legal, and Schwartz tries to cite an AT&T antitrust decision — Mehta doesn’t bite. “Can you point to any case where there is a directive to a monopolist to out of pocket make an expenditure?” he asks. “We’re talking about nine figures at least.” Schwartz says all he’s got is AT&T. “The power of defaults is real,” Mehta says, but “that’s a different question than whether I can legally grant the remedy you’re asking.”
We’re back to the DOJ, whose attorney is saying Google’s claim only it can steward Chrome is wrong — and that separating Google from Chrome will, conversely, let it evolve. He struggles to cite a specific legal case that would explicitly justify an order like a Chrome divestiture, but he says looking to the body of law on mergers could be useful, and while the judge can’t require Chromium employees to stick around, he could order financial incentives or other measures that would make Google fill any empty roles.
Google’s lawyer is making a long case against the Chrome sale — essentially arguing that nobody else has the pragmatic incentives to keep developing Chromium or the ability to maintain Chrome as competently. Any divested version of Chrome will be “a shadow of the current Chrome,” he says. “I don’t see how anybody would be better off.” Also, he says, 80 percent of Chrome users are outside the US, and they’d be affected by the divestiture as well.
Schmidtlein says not only is it not justified by the law, the tangible harms outweigh “speculative benefits” to the competitive landscape. There’s “voluminous evidence” Chrome succeeded through innovation.
Mehta says the outcome of this plan is “less speculative” than many of the other proposals, and “in some sense, it’s from a judicial standpoint, a little cleaner and a little more elegant and a little less speculative than some of the other remedies.”
We’re currently hearing from a lawyer for the state lawsuit against Google, and Mehta is drilling down on a fairly salient issue: will Chromium employees actually move from Google to whoever buys it? The attorney says it’s common industry practice for workers to come with a company. That might be a reasonable claim, but it’s not a hard rule — and if it turns out not to apply here, that’s a potentially big temporary hit to Chromium’s maintenance and all the browser makers that rely on it.
Mehta asks whether a Chrome buyer would need to demonstrate it was capable of maintaining the open source Chromium project that powers numerous other browsers. “There are very few that could actually demonstrate it today,” he says. The DOJ’s attorney says there could be a negotiation with the future buyer to ensure a commitment, and people who are currently working on Chromium at Google would come over to the new owner.
Back after a short break, Dahlquist is arguing for why Google should have to sell its web browser. “Browsers are the way users get into the internet,” he says, and a huge part of that is search. He recaps the basics about Chrome’s popularity, including that 35 percent of Google queries come through Chrome.
Mehta asks about conditions the DOJ might put on selling Chrome, including whether the new owner would be banned from keeping Google as a default. Dahlquist seems to say it wouldn’t be, since the goal is simply to create more opportunities for competition. Mehta follows up: who would own it? I can’t see the slide Dahlquist shows to answer that question, but we’ve discussed the answer here.
We’re nearing the end of the day and currently on break. A few broad highlights:
Mehta asks the DOJ’s attorney why Microsoft would bother paying for placement if Google weren’t able to bid, echoing the claim from Google’s lawyer.
“Even Bing will know this time period will end,” Dahlquist answers, since the ban on Google bidding would expire. And “in the long term, which is what we’re focused on, when this market is operating at a competitive level, we expect those payments could go up.” In other words, Microsoft would know it couldn’t rest safe in being a new, secure monopolist, so it’s incentivized to pay a reasonable amount to companies like Mozilla.
Ban Google from bidding for default search engine placement, says Schmidtlein, and Microsoft will just roll up with its own wheelbarrow of cash for a similar exclusive deal with Bing. “This would be one of the most invasive remedies I can imagine, and it would also harm all of these adjacent markets,” he says. He adds that companies are “competing just fine with Gemini” as well.
That’s Google’s attorney’s description of how OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a “lark.” The underlying argument is that the judge doesn’t need to impose long-term restrictions, since the market moves so fast — and now, of course, OpenAI is raising billions in funding.
Mehta seems dubious that any conventional search engine will ever come to rival Google. If a competitor emerges, “it’s not going to be DuckDuckGo,” he says. It won’t even be Microsoft. It will be, he says, likely an AI service that includes search.
Mehta brings up an issue Apple’s Eddy Cue raised during his testimony. Cue said that if Google was banned from cutting exclusive deals, Apple would still be forced to use it as the default because it’s the only viable option, while Google would simply stop needing to pay it for that placement. Is that a valid problem?
“The answer is today versus tomorrow,” Dahlquist says. “Hopefully in a future, world, he would say, I’ve got two or three great options out there,” and he can “play them off each other” to cut even better deals.
Mehta poses a weighty question to the DOJ: how seriously should he take the dire warnings that companies Google pays for default placement, including Mozilla, have made during testimony? “Every single distribution partner ... has said, this would harm us. This would harm us. Some have gone so far as to suggest this would put them out of business,” Mehta says. “Is that an acceptable outcome to fix one market at the risk of harming others? Because that’s what these other folks are telling us.” Mozilla, for instance, has said its Google deal provides the vast majority of its revenue.
“We don’t dispute the possibility of some private impact,” Dahlquist responds, though he disputes the magnitude. He argues that these warnings are still speculative, and that the issue at hand now is how to fix Google’s monopoly. Mehta seems dubious, saying a dramatic remedy could amount to him damaging the phone and browser market — both of which, incidentally, Google operates in. How, he asks, should he balance breaking Google’s hold on search with serving the larger public good?
Dahlquist makes the case for banning Google from offering payments for default placement on platforms, singling out its “astronomical” revenue-sharing deal with Apple. “If we continue to let Google pay for distribution, it will continue to win every contract,” he said. “Nobody can pay as much as Google.” He extends this to how Google is handling Gemini default placement.
Mehta asks: does this argument depend on him declaring Gemini a search access point? “I don’t think so,” Dahlquist says. Even if it’s not right now, “it certainly could be tomorrow.”
Lunch now concluded, the DOJ’s Dahlquist is discussing the “monopoly flywheel” that keeps Google dominant, particularly the deals that have given Google default placement on places like Safari. Google has, as Mehta pointed out, offered some concessions here. “Their remedy as I understand it is, drop the word ‘exclusivity” in these deals,” Dahlquist says, and the DOJ agrees with that. But he says Google “doesn’t go nearly far enough” in including Gemini in its proposals.
Or more specifically, the lack of a detailed plan from the government about how to preserve it. “How much detail do I need to put on paper?” Mehta asks DOJ attorney Adam Severt. Right now, he says, he’s got “zero.” The DOJ is aiming for a committee that could decide, which Google strenuously objects to. Mehta runs through a series of steps the committee might have to take and asks how long it would require. A “couple of weeks to month to set up the experiment,” and then “a day or two to run the experiment,” Severt says.
