Google's school AI ultimatum

Good morning, and happy Ocarina of Time day to all who celebrate. Oh, and speaking of celebrating: congratulations to the real winners of the midterms, YouTube and Twitch streamers.

Inbox is the tech newsletter that goes beyond the news cycle. We cover the most important 9to5Google stories from the last couple of days along with a few highlights from around the web. We publish every Tuesday and Thursday, and if you like what you read, please subscribe.

Inbox is written by Daniel Bader. Read previous issues here, and then catch up with Ben Schoon’s excellent Weekender column published every Sunday.

⭐️ Starred

It's hard to overstate how reliant US school districts are on Google. Almost every school board in the country purchases Chromebooks for their students, many of whom are able to take them home and treat them as personal laptops. IT and procurement managers like them because they're relatively cheap and offer zero-touch enrollment, which lowers upfront and ongoing maintenance costs. Teachers also like them because Google Classroom is relatively intuitive and ChromeOS is optimized for most other web-based education platforms.

But this reliance on Google's tech stack comes at a cost: school boards are forced to comply with the company's capricious terms of service, in particular when it comes to the creeping proliferation of AI across its products.

Things came to a head earlier this week when the New York Times reported that changes to the Google Search experience in schools will require opting into Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and, perhaps most importantly, AI Overviews. The move actually comes after Google was pressured to make student AI usage opt-in. Google's justification: search and AI are now "deeply integrated" in the tech stack, so disabling one means disabling the other.

Google's alternative to AI Overviews is a new Guided Learning feature, which replaces search's primary function — solving a problem — with a step-by-step guide that helps a student understand said problem.

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan took to X to decry the move: "Google is using its search monopoly to coerce schools into adopting AI," she said. "This highlights the danger of allowing an unregulated monopolist to control an essential service. Multiple courts have found Google liable for violating antitrust laws, and this latest move shows it remains unchastened. As the public increasingly pushes back against the use of AI in schools, Google is making clear it will punish those who don’t fall in line."

I have a feeling Google will need to walk back this decision in some form. As 9to5's Ben Schoon points out, it's comically easy to disable AI Overviews in the current version of Google Search, and it doesn't seem to have a detrimental impact on the subsequent results. But Google is likely worried that if it is forced to carve out versions of the search experience for specific user bases, revenue from its burgeoning AI Overviews ad business may be impacted.

Even if Google sticks to its proverbial guns, the move exposes a rift between the public, particularly parents, and the tech giants pushing AI on their users. Furthermore, the AI boom has had a direct impact on educators' ability to purchase new hardware and upgrade old Chromebook fleets, since component prices have increased by as much as 5x over the past year. Some lower-income districts are even recalling Chromebooks from students, reverting to a shared laptop pool to save money.

✉️ Inbox

• Redmagic 12 Pro review: You’ve never gamed on a phone like this before. We talked about this phone on The Sideload this week: as Android gets better for games, I think gaming phones will be increasingly important for Android.

  • The Sideload 050: The phones Samsung and Google won’t make
• Google has fixed Android Auto issues on Samsung Galaxy phones running One UI 9 [U]
• Google confirms Android’s new ‘Family Hub’ feature, and this is what it looks like. Android is getting a bit more family-friendly.
• Xiaomi confirms Android 17 HyperOS 4 rollout schedule for these devices
• Galaxy Z Fold 8 sales spike amid iPhone Duo release and ‘crackgate’ debacle. The iPhone Duo's display issues may not yet constitute a scandal, but Samsung's category lead has never seemed so assured.
• Google confirms something was draining Pixel Watch batteries, fix rolling out. Pixel owners seemingly can't catch a break.
• Android Auto 18.1 update rolling out with additional prep for light mode and redesign. Another minor redesign is coming to what is arguably the best version of Android out there.
• Google’s Stadia Controller dream lives on in the $50 Xbox Nano Controller. I need this little guy.
• ‘Cyclon’ uses an old Google Pixel to let AI do literally everything for you – who wants this? Nobody, Ben. Nobody.
• ChatGPT has hit roughly 20% of Google Search volume, OpenAI says. This is a staggering number achieved in only four years. It's no wonder Google is freaking out.
• Peak Design’s new wireless charging stand pulls double duty, literally. I saw prototypes for these way back at CES in January, and the final versions look way more polished. Looking forward to trying them.
• Google Messages redesigning pinned chats and moving search
• Google Photos now lets you turn off background music in Memories. Thank goodness. I genuinely hate this feature.
• Google will fix Nest devices that didn’t adjust for Daylight Savings, breaking alarms and more. Oh, Canada.
• Microsoft says it now sucks less to use a Windows PC with 8GB of RAM. Seems like Google isn't the only company doubling down on efficiency.
• Three months in, Galaxy Z Fold 8’s cameras aren’t enough, and Fold 9 might not fix it. Ben's absolutely right about this: I love my Fold 8, but its cameras are straight-up terrible.
• The first Snapdragon phone with Android Linux Terminal support is here
• Nothing teases screen-less product launching next month, ‘couldn’t have been an app’. This certainly sounds like something that records your every interaction. Couldn't Bee, right?
• ‘Enough Phone’ is an Android phone roughly the size of iPhone 13 Mini, launching in 2027. I have to respect the gumption of releasing a phone that will almost certainly be a one-off, but is this what people are really after in 2027?
• Henry Cavill builds 16-bit ‘Mustache Protocol’ game on Googlebook for a good cause. This is not doing the Googlebook brand any favors.

➡️ FWD:

For a much less complicated relationship with Google Search, try its Ocarina of Time Easter egg. Search for “Zelda” or “Ocarina of Time,” then tap the Master Sword to travel back to a 1998-style results page, complete with Link’s sound effects. It's a trip down memory lane to a time when, as even Google acknowledges, things were a whole lot simpler.

Was AI on the ballot? According to Ben Thompson at Stratechery, it was in a big way. Democrats and Republicans both rejected data centers, but Democrats want to actually pass some regulation reining in the hyperscalers' and frontier labs' ambitions.

First we were short on compute, but that ramped; now we are short on memory, but that will ramp; we were coming close to being short on power, but that will be rectified. The final constraint is political, and that may be the most imposing constraint of all. Not only is it harder to solve, but it actually interferes with solving the other constraints. Many of the theories about AI assume that it becomes a commodity; I think it’s just as likely we are looking at scarcity for much longer than we expected, which will have ripple effects on everything.

Is it possible to pass broad AI regulation that will slow down an industry that has been allowed to run unchecked since Trump's reelection in 2024? And is it in the best interest of these companies to support it, even if it means a short-term slowdown at a time when the two biggest AI labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, are about to IPO?

Some fascinating developments in the $6.3 billion Binance hack: turns out it was yet another case of social engineering. A Binance engineer was lured into a fake job interview, before which he downloaded malware that let hackers breach his computer and, eventually, others on the network.

🗑️ Trash

After my discussion with Will last week about the death of browsers, it came as no surprise to learn that Brave is being sued by the New York Times for copyright infringement. Brave is accused of scraping paywalled material from sites like nytimes.com and selling access to it through a search API to AI companies, which use it as training data. Yes, it's difficult to earn money as a browser maker (see Arc for another compelling example), but this is particularly egregious, even for a company familiar with shady business practices.

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Thanks for reading, and have a great day. I'll talk to you on Tuesday.

—Daniel

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