Google's FTC "Win"? Google Has Bigger Fish To Fry
Sure, the FTC’s decision to not force Google to divest core businesses such as Chrome is a win, but the Mountain View company has bigger fish to fry.
Google (GOOGL) is losing search share to LLMs - GPT, Claude and Grok in particular.
Google’s LLM family - Gemini - is quite good at coding, Gemini 2.5 Pro in particular. However, even if Gemini 3.0 was to leap the field and dominate the automated coding use case (I do not expect it to do so), I do not see that opportunity as large enough to offset a collapse of Google’s search business.
Google must weave fully automated services into its search hub. For example, point at Google Search from your phone, tap the DoorDash (DASH) icon, and complete your order inside of Google. Ditto for every other service you can think of.
Automating popular services end-to-end should enable Google to remain the search leader over the long-term. Google’s A2A effort is a step in the right direction. However, the status quo - returning a series of links and Ads to users is a sure path to irrelevancy.