Despite the hue and frevor over Artificial Intelligence (AI) mistakes and investments, the European Union (EU) has gone full-bore into an investigation of Google’s business practices in the AI space. The concerns for the major part of the investigation are competition in the space.
The EU is coming under fire from Big Tech and American Tech Elites for working to regulate AI according to EU standards, rather than American standards. The bloc is focused on competition and the concerns for the use of tech and AI throughout the continent. The EU has launched an investigation into whether Google has perhaps breached the EU’s competition laws by not compensating owners of websites that the company uses to gather AI data, to provide summaries when someone inputs a query into the Google search bar that appear above search results.
Tech Crunch has provided a quote to this in their article EU launches Antitrust Probe into Google’s AI search tools.
“The Commission will investigate to what extent the generation of AI Overviews and AI Mode by Google is based on web publishers’ content without appropriate compensation for that, and without the possibility for publishers to refuse without losing access to Google Search,” was the statement from the executive branch of the EU’s commission, to TechCrunch.
This is just one of seven major lawsuits being brought against the tech giant. The question is, do any of these lawsuits create change in the company’s business behavior? Probably not, and here is why.
None of these lawsuits does something that is necessary to see change, actually affect the main issue facing consumers, Google’s lack of response to privacy issues, namely, removing Google’s easy access to private information. Here are the lawsuits at the present time.
United States Department of Justice, investigation of Google’s search practices caused a Federal Judge to rule that Google had breached the Sherman Act, and was a monopolist in the online search market (August 2024 – ongoing)
United States Department of Justice investigation into Google’s digital advertising technology, where a federal judge ruled that Google had formed an illegal monopoly in the ad business market. (April 2023 – Pending)
United States, Texas, and Other States, there was state level lawsuits from investigations into monopolistic practices by Google over how they collect and use location data that breached privacy regulations for consumers. Texas has settled this litigation for a $1.375 billion damages payment and no liability for Google. Google did not have to plead guilty at the settlement. In another lawsuit, Google paid a $700 million settlement to eligible consumers over location privacy breaches in the Google Play Store. Google did not have to admit guilt or culpability in the settlement agreement. (May 2025, Ongoing and Settled)
United States Class Action Lawsuit: Federal Investigation into Google’s web and app activity tracking services found that the company had collected data from consumers even after consumers had turned off the web and app activity tracking settings. Google was fined $425 Million and is appealing the ruling. (September 2025 – appeal pending)
United States Class Action Lawsuit: Investigation alleges that Google Assistant records communications without using an activation word (False Accepts), which Google has denied. (This is ongoing as of the date of this article)
United States Class Action Lawsuit: investigation into Google’s practices of illegally tracking users in incognito mode. The lawsuit was settled when Google purged billions of records of personal information.
United States Companies Suing Google, Penske Media (Owner of Rolling Stone and Billboard), as well as other publishers, are suing Google over search engine search results that have an AI summary before the search results. Publishers are alleging that the AI Overviews are reducing traffic to their websites and infringing on copyright. (Ongoing, early stages)
In all these lawsuits, whether fined or not, Google is absolved of the type of liability that would cause its reputation to suffer.
Approximately 62% to 70% of all users of the internet use Google’s Chrome browser. It is a consistent ruling methodology to allow Google not to plead guilty in any of these lawsuits, in the final findings of the settlements. This type of settlement ruling has been in the courts for big tech for some time, starting with Microsoft anti-trust litagation which only resulted in the re-distribution of the overall public entity, defining new roles for the members that investigations had breached anti-trust regulations. These light-handed rulings have paved the way for companies like Amazon and Walmart to restrict compensation methods and redistribute compensation to avoid scrutiny under labor laws. Those companies separate their distribution companies, and their distribution methods and warehouses under different company names in order to hide OSHA breaches and avoid Labor Compensation scrutiny, (for the unsafe working conditions under a tiered performance methodology) practices that would fall under anti-trust litigation and not from separate companies, under conglomerate jurisdictions.
AI rulings that do not address this lack of accountability in reputation will have a deep effect on governance, allowing corporate monopolies, through conglomerate manipulation, to deceive the public, cause the normalization of deceitful terms and conditions. The company is then able to reap the benefits of such deceit by paying small fines to many people and never speaking of the issue again, and continuing the behavior by changing the initial process somewhat.
Google is well aware that it is not being held to account. During the 2024 fiscal year Google revenue was $350 Billion, during settlements and after. The net profit was $100 billion, this is not the broad range of companies that Alphabet owns, and uses the same practices to gather private consumer information or control the market through conglomerate monopolies.
Google collects data from approximately 3.85 billion users, throughout the world. That is a monopoly under any normal reckoning.
Most enterprise-level companies use these types of litigation techniques to lock out competition and force-feed consumers only their marketing and offers. The race for AI will be both a boon and a control of the population, through these methodologies within the legal system. Economists, during recessions, have always resolved inflation and market collapse by injections of resources into medium and small business development. In 2021, the government injected $1 Trillion into the small and medium business sectors to stimulate economic growth. Many enterprise companies, such as airlines, banking, the housing market, and the stock markets, used the stimulus subsidies to buy back stock and fuel corporate expansion, which has led to forcing out the small and medium businesses that were invigorated by the stimulus.
AI will allow this deep monopolizing of the economy, while we are worried about AI bubbles and those types of media hype, will result in fewer companies and less economically stimulating competition. The way to combat this is to expose the major corporate structures that the courts allow, through conglomerate monopolization. Limiting what companies can purchase other companies, but more importantly, limiting how one company uses renaming and market sector restructuring to avoid accountability and responsibility for deceptive practices that allow it to monopolize a market, while only presenting themselves as a conglomerate business structure.
