A US court ruled in August that Google has a search monopoly, and while Google appeals, the Justice Department is considering what possible penalties to impose – reminiscent of shutting down Chrome.
As a part of that process, in line with a recent court filing, the DOJ desires to call one particular witness: Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer of Perplexity, an AI search provider most recently valued at $9 billion. per Reuters.
Perplexity and other generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT Search have emerged as a possible alternative for web searches because they’ll provide direct answers to complicated questions (albeit sometimes with made-up or inaccurate information). Google has responded to the threat with its own AI search tools reminiscent of AI Overviews, which give AI-generated answers on top of search results.
The DOJ desires to query Shevelenko about generative AI's “relationship to look access points, distribution, barriers to entry and expansion, and data sharing.”
“Search access points” is a term the DOJ uses to explain things like Google Chrome – places where people search the web.
While the filing doesn't spell out exactly why the DOJ desires to query Perplexity about these issues, it could help its argument that Google monopolizes the search business and excludes potential competitors and subsequently deserves stronger penalties.
TechCrunch asked Perplexity whether the corporate agreed with its executive's statement and what its opinion was on the antitrust case. Perplexity didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment, and neither did Google.
The perplexity is effectively caught in the midst of the argument, as each side want information from it that might help their cases. Google subpoenaed Perplexity in October for corporate documents to prove the corporate had an actual competitor within the search space. (Google has also subpoenaed Microsoft and OpenAI.)
However, Perplexity had not submitted a single document to Google as of December 11, the tech giant complained in a lawsuit, claiming that after two months of waiting there was “no conceivable justification for any further delay.”
Perplexity, for its part, says within the filing that it has already agreed to meet 12 of Google's 14 document requests, but is “still weighing the burden related to collecting such a potentially vast universe of documents.”
Perplexity also says that while Google has agreed to supply copies of the license agreements “in reference to AI training,” Google wants all of Perplexity's license agreements and has asked Google to “meet and seek the advice of” about this.
