Google Says Schools That Disable AI Will Lose Search Too

Taking a page from Microsoft’s 1990s antitrust playbook, Google said that schools that disable AI will lose access to Search.

“We believe schools should have control over AI in their classrooms and in providing administrators with controls to help them manage their approach,” Google vice president and general manager of education Chris Phillips explains. “After listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers, we are now updating our approach to controls for Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.”

That doesn’t sound too bad. After all, schools that don’t want to use Gemini AI can just “explicitly” turn Google Search back on. But it’s what Phillips doesn’t say here that rankles. Because he says it elsewhere.

“Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” Phillips told The New York Times. “[If a school has banned AI], will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.” He delivered an identical to quote to Techcrunch and other publications, too.

Ah, yes. Integrated.

Let the record show that Microsoft tried this argument with Windows and Internet Explorer in its U.S. antitrust trial after it had artificially tied the two products together, not to benefit consumers like it claimed, but to harm the competition, in that case Netscape. Microsoft’s public stance was that Internet Explorer wasn’t a separate product, but was instead a feature of Windows. And when it was required to ship a version of Windows without Internet Explorer, Microsoft complied by shipping a version of Windows that didn’t work to make its point.

“It seemed absolutely clear to you that I entered an order that required that you distribute a product that would not work?” Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson asked Microsoft executive David Cole on the stand.

“In plain English, yes,” he replied. “We followed that order. It wasn’t my place to consider the consequences of that.”

This is exactly what Google is doing with Gemini and Google Search. Even though Gemini is, in fact, a product, one that it sells separately through several different subscriptions, Google is now claiming that Gemini is just a feature of Google Search. And that because these two things are so well integrated, there is no way to offer one without the other. That’s obviously not true, but I’m curious has taken the additionally Microsoftian step of integrating the two artificially to force customers who want one product, Search, to use the other too.

Folks, this is antitrust 101.

Google’s dominant market position in Internet search is legally a monopoly, thanks to rulings in its recent antitrust cases. That alone makes this policy illegal. But Google also got off far too lightly in its historic U.S. antitrust case about search, with U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta declining to to prevent Google from leveraging its search dominance to promote its AI efforts. And now Google is doing just that.

“Forcing AI on school children [is] how a monopolist behaves when they think people are powerless,” DuckDuckGo’s Kamyl Bazbaz tweeted. Not coincidentally, DuckDuckGo is now marketing how organizations, including schools, can configure their private search engine as their default.

“There is no technical reason why Google can’t turn AI off,” the company told me. “AI overviews is a search module like maps, flights, or weather. Google can determine when it shows up and when it doesn’t.”