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Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here. Greetings! This summer is likely to be a bit of a tense time at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. The company is awaiting a judge’s ruling on what shackles to put on the company’s search business to curb its monopoly, which the court previously ruled was illegal. A three-week trial deciding on those shackles wrapped up on Friday in a Washington courtroom, and the judge is expected to issue his final decision by August. My colleague Erin Woo, who was in the courthouse for much of the hearing, did a deep dive this week on what’s likely to happen, based on interpreting the judge’s questions and talking to lawyers watching the proceedings. Her take is that the judge isn’t likely to force a divestiture of Chrome, but he is likely to limit Google’s ability to pay for exclusive distribution of its search app on phones and browsers, and to require Google to share its search data with rivals. Depending on how far the judge goes, these constraints could shrink the company’s search revenue meaningfully. Of course, by the time it has gotten through years of appealing the ruling, its search business may look very different, thanks to competition from ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots. It’s the threat posed by AI that is worrying investors more than the antitrust issue right now. We saw that this week when Google stock plunged following reports that Apple executive Eddy Cue had testified that search queries going through Apple’s Safari browser fell last month for the first time, which he thought was due to AI. (Google issued a statement saying that it continues to see “overall query growth in Search,” including “an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms.”) Google shares finished the week down 7%, while stock of the other big digital ads company, Meta Platforms, was basically flat. The worries about Google are likely overblown, however. What investors need to focus on is search ad revenue, which likely won’t decline in tandem with query volume. Partly that’s because not all queries drive ads. But there’s another issue: Advertising analyst Brian Wieser, of Madison and Wall, argued this week that even if Google’s share of the search market fell to 50% of queries, “Google would probably retain 80% to 90% of all spending on search.” He’s assuming that the rest of the search market fragments between numerous search engines. In that case, most advertisers would find it easier to stick with Google than to manage ad buys on numerous other services. The situation is reminiscent of how the broadcast TV industry retained a huge share of TV advertising even as its viewership shrank, because it remained the best way to reach a large number of people. Of course, even broadcast TV is now losing advertisers. If Google’s search market share fell by half, its ad business would eventually decline. The only question is how long that would take. It was a big week for OpenAI’s evolution into a tech giant. After announcing a change of plans on its nonprofit conversion (details here), we broke the news that the company was making a big executive hire, which OpenAI quickly confirmed was Instacart CEO Fidji Simo. We also broke the news that OpenAI plans to reduce the amount of revenue it shares with its backer, Microsoft. In this piece, we detailed the role Simo will play. Simo’s hire, as noted in Thursday evening’s Briefing, reflects a shift in hiring by AI firms toward marketing and ad roles as companies look to build their AI businesses. In that vein, we also scooped the news that Microsoft was hiring a marketing veteran to help market its Copilot AI chatbot. The Deel versus Rippling spying scandal has reminded our corporate espionage correspondent, Michael Roddan, of the surge in spying lawsuits throughout the fintech industry. Apple has plans for major changes in the iPhone’s design over the next couple of years and will even change the timetable for releasing the phones. See Wayne Ma’s scoop for details. Waymo’s success with its robotaxi service, available in a growing number of cities, has fueled interest in self-driving startups. We identified nine such firms. Meanwhile, we looked at another hot area: robotics startups. On the crypto front, Yueqi Yang broke news that a Trump crypto adviser, David Bailey, is planning a bitcoin investing firm in the mold of Strategy. Start your weekend off with our Big Read, which looks at how big tech firms Meta and Google are more relaxed about privacy nowadays. Exhibit A is Meta’s consideration of adding facial recognition software to its smart glasses, as the story reveals. If you want to understand what Bill Ready has been up to at Pinterest over the past three years, check out this org chart story, which discusses his strategic moves and how he has remade the management team. • President Donald Trump said in a social media post Friday that an 80% tariff on imports from China “seems right,” signaling his support for a sharp reduction from the current 145%. • Rippling has raised $450 million in a round valuing the payroll company at $16.8 billion. Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week. | 
