The antitrust investigation into online search in the US bottled it – with the judge ruling that Google does not have to divest Chrome, can still keep paying billions of dollars for default placements (as long as they are not exclusive), and that the rise of LLM-based search has lessened Google’s influence on the market. Ultimately, Google has gotten away with it. Running concurrently is the second DoJ antitrust investigation, examining Google’s advertising technology stranglehold. Here, a new filing sees Google admit that the open web is in “rapid decline,” which in our view, is by and large due to its own prioritization of its LLM-based article summaries – which encourage people to remain in the Google ecosystem, rather than…