Chrome “Monopoly” Means AI has Arrived

The Justice Department indicated this week that it has finally decided to crack down on Google’s search monopoly and may be requiring that the company sell off its Chrome browser division. It’s an “unbundling” that reminds me of a similar effort against Microsoft back in 1999, when the government demanded that tech behemoth Microsoft separate its then seemingly dominant Explorer browser from the Windows operating system. Or even the one back in 1982, when the government broke up AT&T, which had a monopoly on what later became known as “land lines.”

What these big tech breakups have in common is not that they protect consumers or promote industry competition in some important way — they’re usually too late for that. Rather, it’s they they are all leading indicators of the imminent obsolescence of the technologies they seek to regulate. In other words, once a technology faces anti-monopoly regulation, chances are the technology is already over and about to be replaced, anyway.

The 1982 breakup of AT&T occurred at the dawn of the cellular era, the same year that Motorola came out with the first truly consumer-grade mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X that we now affectionately call “the brick.” AT&T only returned as the name and logo on a re-branded Cingular network.