So how is Google rewarded for incubating an artificial intelligence research laboratory, DeepMind, for which two of its scientists, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, were just announced to have won, along with a third scientist from University of Washington, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry? The Justice Department, in a proposed remedy framework issued on Tuesday, disclosed that it is considering forcing the tech company to break up its parts. 

That’s just one of the solutions that the DOJ proposed to solve the company’s iron grip on online search. In August, a district judge, Amit Mehta, determined that Google had built an illegal monopoly. The ruling, as our Novi Zhukovsky writes, marked a “major win for antitrust enforcers who have been working for years to curb the dominance of big tech companies, particularly as the artificial intelligence business has continued to expand.”

Judge Mehta wrote that Google achieved its market dominance not by “happenstance” but by creating “the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.” Still, however, Judge Mehta ruled that the company’s monopoly was illegal. Google, a Wall Street Journal editorial muses, “makes for a very strange monopolist — one that does better by consumers because its search engine is superior.”

The Justice Department, in a 32-page brief, says it is “considering behavioral and structural remedies” to curb Google from using such products as “Chrome, Play, and Android” to advantage the company “over rivals or new entrants.” The proposal marks the most significant effort by Washington to limit the dominance of big tech companies since the Justice Department’s attempt to do so with Microsoft two decades ago. 

At Google’s DeepMind laboratory, the two laureates used artificial intelligence to predict the structure of millions of proteins. A third  scientist draped with glory, David Baker of the University of Washington, invented a new protein through computer software. AI “is changing the way we do science,” claims an earlier recipient of the Nobel in Chemistry, Frances Arnold. “It is supercharging our ability to explore previously intractable problems.”

The irony is marked by our Ira Stoll in his Substack “The Editors.” He writes that “It’s enough to make you wonder what’s wrong with Washington. The Swedes at least are shrewd enough to reward excellence with prizes; in America, it can sometimes seem as if we punish success. Instead of a prize medal and a white-tie dinner in Stockholm” he writes, “you can expect a lawsuit instead from Merrick Garland’s Justice Department.” 

“This is a bipartisan problem,” Mr. Stoll reckons. “While the Biden Justice Department has been pursuing Google, President Trump and Senator Vance have both also been repeatedly and openly publicly critical of what they deride as Big Tech.” While Mr. Stoll notes that “Big Tech” is not perfect, “politicians might want to be a little more hesitant before demonizing or crushing one of America’s most winning industries.” 

Google, for its part, is expected to fight any attempt at a breakup. The company’s vice president of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, calls the idea “radical” and claims it goes “well beyond the legal scope of the Court’s decision about Search distribution contracts.” An enforced breakup, she writes, would have “significant unintended consequences for consumers, businesses, and American competitiveness.”

“We’ll rue the regulatory onslaught,” Mr. Stoll writes at “The Editors,” yet “we’ll also celebrate that the prizewinner, Google, is an American company.” He contends that “it says something about the power and durability of American capitalism that a company like Google can flourish even despite a hostile public-policy environment.” Mr. Hassabis, after receiving his honor, called his project the “first proof point of AI’s incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery.”

Google’s Nobel, Mr. Stoll adds, “is a reminder that universities aren’t the only places where significant discoveries happen.” The Justice Department’s antitrust lawyers,” he says, “profess to be worried about Google being a monopoly.” In a “larger sense,” though, “what Google and similar innovative companies are doing” is “providing healthy competition to academia’s monopoly on scientific research and discovery. That’s prizeworthy.”