It's been just a couple of days since the ruling on Google's antirust case with the Department of Justice, and I'm just looking at the ruling right now, and I'm curious to see what impact it's going to have on content creators. So, let's look at it together, and we'll react to it together. Let's dive in. As I look at some of the details here as to what was ruled the judge Amit P Meta the ruling looks like it's initially it looks like it's kind of against Google right they say that there wasn't there is an illegal monopoly in online search the department of justice requested a major structural breakup to get um Google to sell its Chrome browser the Android operating system and here's why it makes complete sense Google if their main business is search right by having an operating system on a high percentage of all of the cell phones that are used and that Android operating system. They get to know all the stuff that you're doing on your phone, even when you're not using Google search. Same thing with the Chrome browser because they own the browser that so many people use because it's a good browser. They have a ton of data even when you're not on a Google website. So, what did they decide? The judge said, "Okay, they're imposing behavioral remedies to increase competition." So, they're prohibiting the exclusive contracts. That's one thing, right? Right now, like Google has a contract with Apple. When you use Safari on an Apple device, the default search engine is is uh Google, right? In fact, it's a default search engine for a lot of things because of these contracts that Google has. So, it's prohibiting those to to try to make it so people are maybe less likely to just default to Google. Oh, this is interesting. They're requiring Google to share search engine or search index and user action data with qualified competitors and potential competitors. Okay? So, all this data that Google's generating or at least some of it, whatever the courts decide, they're going to have to start sharing with competitors and potential competitors. That's an opportunity. Okay. Uh we're going to come back to how this is probably all going to impact us as content creators as well as users of internet search, right? They're ordering Google to offer search and search text ad syndication services. Okay, so ads from Google um search text ads and search based ads, those all those ads where people um essentially sponsor their web page to show up for certain keywords, right? They're um requiring Google to offer like a syndication so that I guess across other search engines those same pages will be able to show up. I don't know exactly how that's going to work. Um, I'd have to dig into the details of that, but and then having an oversight mechanisms like an oversight committee to monitor compliance with these things. Okay, so no breakup. There's no breakup. Google gets to continue to own Chrome. They get to continue to own Android. That was declined. So, in the end here, this kind of seems like a slap on the wrist, as well as maybe maybe opening the door for more competition. Part of me is okay with that. um from the standpoint of like Google created Chrome and made it a really good browser. Why should they have to sell it? Now, I get it. Monopoly, that's why they should have to sell it, right? Google created Android and made it the a really good operating system for phones. Why should they have to sell it? Well, because of Monopoly. But they created it. So, I I I see both sides of this. But, as we know as content creators, Google having a monopoly over search puts way too much power in their court. We know over the last couple years as content creators like we have lost significant traffic. Why? Well, a couple of things. First of all, ChachiPT went just wides mainstream, right? People start using it. So, content starts getting published like instantly. We start getting like mass amounts of kind of crappy content being published that's not been vetted that's just being spit out by AI, right? And so then what does Google have to do as a as a result of that? Google has to start looking at other things other than just like the traditional SEO t the traditional SEO metrics that they've looked at especially like the contextual metrics. That stuff didn't work anymore because what what do you do? You get your custom GPT to SEO optimize the content no matter how inaccurate it is. So then Google has to start looking a lot more at some of those EAT metrics and just overall trustworthiness of a website and then of the author that wrote the article and all of those things. And so a lot of us independent individual bloggers just got destroyed by Google. But Bing didn't do the same thing, right? Being approached a little bit differently. My rankings on Bing are still a lot better than they were than they were than on Google, right? Uh post all of this stuff. And same thing with other search engines, duck.go. And so what does this do? Well, it looks like by forcing Google to share information to share this uh search index information and the user interaction data, all this data with how we people interact with with the content, sharing that data with all these other search engines and even potential competitors to Google like new search engines that can come out. That's powerful. That's going to give other search engines an opportunity to not be so far behind Google just in how they perform. So, I think we're going to see other search engines get better faster, which I think is a good thing. The other thing is by removing these exclusive contracts, uh, which was one of the things it's likely that we'll see at least a little bit of shift because right right now people default to Google in part because it's Google. But one of the biggest reasons is not just that Google is such a great search engine, but it's also because it's just a default. Google Chrome is a good browser. A lot of us use it. It might not come standard on your computer, but you know, when you open Microsoft Edge and realize it sucks and then decide to get Chrome, now you've got Google as your default browser. Well, again, if these other search engines and hopefully internet browsers are getting better, then people aren't going to necessarily choose Google and go out of their way to pick Google. And if it's not the default, like when you open up an Android phone or when you open up an iPhone and it's the default for everything, you know, people are are gonna just they're gonna have more of a choice up front. They're you're going to pick what default search engine do you want to use instead of like in the setup of your iPhone, it's like Google. It's just Google. So, I think we're going to see other search engines start to be used more. I don't think we're going to see a huge shift in search traffic, especially not in the immediate term. So, let's talk. What does this mean? Well, in the short term, I think it means basically nothing because all that's happened is Google can't make these exclusive contracts anymore. Also, other search engines are going to get better data, so they're going to be able to improve faster. In the immediate term, that means nothing. But over time, we should see other search engines get better, get better a lot faster. And so we might decide, oh yeah, this other search engine is as good as Google but different and I like different things about it. Like this one over here that's privacycentric, more like duck.go, but that's also as good as Google in terms of its search capabilities. So I think over time this could help, but I'm not optimistic for an immediate term or a very short-term change. And we'll see. We'll just see what happens. If it doesn't change, the ruling says that um the DOJ might end up or it's not in the ruling, but the DOJ has said they're going to appeal this if these remedies are ineffective. So, if Google still ends up maintaining like a 90ish% market share on all search, then the DOJ is going to come back and say that wasn't enough. And I think at that point, we'd have enough evidence to suggest that you're right, it wasn't enough. And I think that they'll revisit the potential breakup of Google, but not yet. So for content creators in the short term, not much of a change. Um, Google still has the power. So what we're going to see is just as the Google algorithm changes and as you improve your EAT and your outreach and participate in your industry and do all the things we've talked about on this channel for the last couple years, you can use your blog content that and that's going to continue to be a support to your business. But I would say don't count on just being a blogger making passive income from ads. That hasn't worked for a while and it's not gonna this isn't changing anything right now. Last thing that I'd like to point out and part of the reason why I'm really confident that Google is not very worried about this is because um and maybe someone at Google's worried about it, but let's look at the stock price. This ruling came out and Google's stock price jumped 8 n 10%. In the last 5 days, it's up 10%. Right before the ruling, it was up slightly from 5 days ago. So, it wasn't quite a 10% overnight jump, but from where it's at today, 2 days after the ruling, to where it was at just a few days before the ruling, it's a more than 10% jump. The stock price at Google right now is the highest it has literally ever been. What does that mean? It means that the big institutional investors saw this ruling as a win for Google. They were watching. They were waiting to see what would happen at the ruling. If it ended up being stronger and breaking up Google or doing anything more punitive to Google, then you would have seen the stock price drop because you would have seen these companies pull out as quickly as possible. Um, and not just these companies, but these big institutional investors, they would have started decreasing their share in Google. Instead, the ruling came out and all of these people who have been watching this like hawks waiting to see what would happen to Google's stock price. These financial analysts whose job it is to track Google saw the ruling and immediately started picking up more shares and that drove the stock price up. That means that this really financially, at least in the short term, this is a win for Google. We're not going to see anything change. Not anytime soon. But I'm hopeful that over time we may start to see other search engines start to pick up a little bit. And when that happens, it'll help at least diversify our risk so that no one search engine is driving the vast majority of the traffic for our websites. But again, that's why we we stopped focusing on Google so a couple years ago. That's why we're so focused on using social media, participating in your industry, getting interviewed on podcasts, doing uh creating video content on YouTube, which I know same parent company, but a completely different algorithm. and run by completely different people. And so like diversify your risk and participate the best you can and in your industry and that's going to do a lot more for you than sitting waiting hoping that the Department of Justice eventually wins out over Google and manages to break search up so that people start using other search engines. So that's what happened. A whole lot of waiting and a whole lot to see what would happen and in the end very little changes. I think that's a pretty common thing for the most part. So, don't put your trust and don't put your faith in government to fix your problems. Go fix them yourself. Thanks for joining me today here on Income School. We'll see you all soon. [Music]