Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national governments, Bell Labs and IBM were both probably the biggest funders of basic research in the last century during their respective heydays. Bell was obviously a monopoly and while IBM might never have faced anti-trust penalties, they did at one point control 70% of the mainframe market and the DoJ did bring a case against them (that was eventually dismissed by the Reagan administration.)

I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.

That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades.

Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently.

Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible.

I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.

That's an interesting question. A lot of basic research is done in pursuit of creating entirely new markets. Being the first entrant to a new market makes you a monopolist in a way by default. It doesn't necessarily have to be anti-competitive.

I'd argue the fact that Google publishes much more of their research than their competitors do is a strong indicator that they're actually not the anti-competitive ones.

It's normal for mature industries to evolve into oligopolies. The filing goes far beyond fighting cartel-like behavior, into pretty ludicrous stuff (like "open access to Google’s datasets and search Index").

The greatest private sector basic research institute that has ever existed was the result of a government granted monopoly, so you have to admit, it helps.

Debatable. I visited the down at the heels post break up Bell Labs and it was sad.

There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? Many consumers also switch their search to Google when presented with other options or defaults.

What monopoly?

Google's entire business model is currently under threat right now.

How?

The software world was basically created by Xerox and AT&T research.