“With the rise of AI, the paradigm is shifting from traditional search to a more dynamic ‘seek’ approach, where users can ask AI for answers,” Ram pointed out. “The antitrust ruling potentially opens the door for alternatives, including AI-powered search. For new market entrants, such as SearchGPT, this ruling is a boon.”
Park added that it would be interesting to see if other smaller providers, such as DuckDuckGo or Perplexity, will also get a fair shot at these competitive search contracts or whether they are simply handed to Microsoft.
“That market opportunity will largely determine whether this decision actually breaks up a monopoly or simply redistributes billions of dollars from one large tech company to another to create a mostly uncompetitive duopoly,” Park said.
