Why is Google Holding Schools Hostage?

Last week, Google announced that in response to pressure from parents and educators that they would no longer have AI tools turned on by default in their popular education apps that are used in over 60,000 k through 12 schools. There was, however, a catch. They said if you do not turn those tools back on, they're not gonna give you access to Google search. In other words, Google was holding these schools hostages and saying, if you do not allow our vision of AI in your educational process, if you not let us to put our AI tools into your classroom so that we in in essence are having a big say in how kids learn, we're gonna turn off basic access to the Internet. As you can imagine, this did not go over well. The... I have a quote here. The law professor and anti monopoly advocate Zephyr Teachout tweeted the following, and I'm reading here. Google says we are going to force you to break your own rules. You can't have search without AI. New York City must call Google's bluff, kick out search, and refer the case to the AG and DA for illegal tying and abuse of monopoly power. Another tweet I found from a middle school English teacher was a little more blunt. The tweet read, bleep Google for marketing these Chromebooks to schools, pushing Google Classroom, and then screwing us over by including that stupid AI overview on every Google search. It's impossible to assign writing questions to Google Classroom without them cheating. Well, look, this felt like a topic that we needed to discuss. I wanted to get into what actually is going on here, why Google is doing this, and how we as a community should react. So I thought I would jump on the mic real quick and record a brief episode on exactly those questions. Let's get into it. Alright. Let's start with the question of what exactly is going on here. I read you a summary early on. I thought we would jump into a representative news article that came out after this announcement was made to see if we can get a few more details. I'll load this up on the screen here for people who are also watching. I have here an article from NBC News. The headline here is Google to shut off search for schools that opt out of AI. The subhead here says the company said AI enabled products would be shut off by default for schools, which would also cut off their access to Google search. Alright. Let's look a little bit more deeply at what is happening here. So they announced that they would switch off AI products by default. All right. That seems like potentially a good thing. In fact, I can even mark this up with my new fancy software. Boom. Seems like a good thing. But those schools that forego its AI services would also be cut off …