For almost two years now, the world’s biggest tech companies have been at war over generative AI. Meta may be known for social media, Google for search, and Amazon for online shopping, but since the release of ChatGPT, each has made tremendous investments in an attempt to dominate in this new era. Along with start-ups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, their spending on data centers and chatbots is on track to eclipse the costs of sending the first astronauts to the moon.

To be successful, these companies will have to do more than build the most “intelligent” software: They will need people to use, and return to, their products. Everyone wants to be Facebook, and nobody wants to be Friendster. To that end, the best strategy in tech hasn’t changed: build an ecosystem that users can’t help but live in. Billions of people use Google Search every day, so Google built a generative-AI product known as “AI Overviews” right into the results page, granting it an immediate advantage over competitors.

This is why a recent proposal from the Department of Justice is so significant. The government wants to break up Google’s monopoly over the search market, but its proposed remedies may in fact do more to shape the future of AI. Google owns 15 products that serve at least half a billion people and businesses each—a sprawling ecosystem of gadgets, search and advertising, personal applications, and enterprise software. An AI assistant that shows up in (or works well with) those products will be the one that those people are most likely to use. And Google has already woven its flagship Gemini AI models into Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, the Play Store, and YouTube, all of which have at least 2 billion users each. AI doesn’t have to be life-changing to be successful; it just has to be frictionless. The DOJ now has an opportunity to add some resistance. (In a statement last week, Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, called the Department of Justice’s proposed remedy part of an “interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership,” including the company’s “leading role” in AI.)

[Read: The horseshoe theory of Google Search]

Google is not the only competitor with an ecosystem advantage. Apple is integrating its Apple Intelligence suite across eligible iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Meta, with more than 3 billion users across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, enjoys similar benefits. Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, has garnered little major attention but nonetheless became available to the website’s U.S. shoppers this fall. However much of the DOJ’s request the court ultimately grants, these giants will still lead the AI race—but Google had the clearest advantage among them.

Just how good any of these companies’ AI products are has limited relevance to their adoption. Google’s AI tools have repeatedly shown major flaws, such as confidently recommending eating rocks for good health, but the features continue to be used by more and more people simply because they’re there. Similarly, Apple’s AI models are less powerful than Gemini or ChatGPT, but they will have a huge user base simply because of how popular the iPhone is. Meta’s AI models may not be state-of-the-art, but that doesn’t matter to billions of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users who just want to ask a chatbot a silly question or generate a random illustration. Tech companies without such an ecosystem are well aware of their disadvantage: OpenAI, for instance, is reportedly considering developing its own web browser, and it has partnered with Apple to integrate ChatGPT across the company’s phones, tablets, and computers.

[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]

This is why it’s relevant that the DOJ’s proposed antitrust remedy takes aim at Google’s broader ecosystem. Federal and state attorneys asked the court to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser; cease preferencing its search products in the Android mobile operating system; prevent it from paying other companies, including Apple and Samsung, to make Google the default search engine; and allow rivals to syndicate Google’s search results and use its search index to build their own products. All of these and the DOJ’s other requests, under the auspices of search, are really shots at Google’s expansive empire.

As my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, selling Chrome might not affect Google’s search dominance: “People returned to Google because they wanted to, not just because the company had strong-armed them,” he wrote last week. But selling Chrome and potentially Android, as well as preventing Google from making its search engine the default option for various other companies’ products, would make it harder for Google to funnel billions of people to the rest of its software, including AI. Meanwhile, access to Google’s search index could provide a huge boost to OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft, and other AI search competitors: Perhaps the hardest part of building a searchbot is trawling the web for reliable links, and rivals would gain access to the most coveted way of doing so.

[Read: Google already won]

The Justice Department seems to recognize that the AI war implicates and goes beyond search. Without intervention, Google’s search monopoly could give it an unfair advantage over AI as well—and an AI monopoly could further entrench the company’s control over search. The court, attorneys wrote, must prevent Google from “manipulating the development and deployment of new technologies,” most notably AI, to further throttle competition.

And so the order also takes explicit aim at AI. The DOJ wants to bar Google from self-preferencing AI products, in addition to Search, in Chrome, Android, and all of its other products. It wants to stop Google from buying exclusive rights to sources of AI-training data and disallow Google from investing in AI start-ups and competitors that are in or might enter the search market. (Two days after the DOJ released its proposal, Amazon invested another $4 billion into Anthropic, the start-up and OpenAI rival that Google has also heavily backed to this point, suggesting that the e-commerce giant might be trying to lock in an advantage over Google.) The DOJ also requested that Google provide a simple way for publishers to opt out of their content being used to train Google’s AI models or be cited in AI-enhanced search products. All of that will make it harder for Google to train and market future AI models, and easier for its rivals to do the same.

When the DOJ first sued Google, in 2020, it was concerned with the internet of old: a web that appeared intractably stuck, long ago calcified in the image of the company that controls how billions of people access and navigate it. Four years and a historic victory later, its proposed remedy enters an internet undergoing an upheaval that few could have foreseen—but that the DOJ’s lawsuit seems to have nonetheless anticipated. A frequently cited problem with antitrust litigation in tech is anachronism, that by the time a social-media, or personal-computing, or e-commerce monopoly is apparent, it is already too late to disrupt. With generative AI, the government may finally have the head start it needs.

Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump. Smith effectively had no choice. Trump had promised to fire him and end the cases as soon as he took office on January 20. (The president-elect reportedly plans to fire not only Smith but also career attorneys who were assigned to his team.)

In both cases, these were crimes that only a president could commit: No one else could have attempted to remain in office by the same means, and few people could have made off with boxes full of these documents. And only a president-elect with nearly unlimited resources could have gotten away with them.

[Read: The Trump-Trumpist divide]

Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.

The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority.

The strategy was not without risks. His claims of presidential immunity drew scoffs from many legal scholars, as well as judges on the first two levels of the federal court system. But the Supreme Court took as long as possible before issuing a ruling substantially agreeing with Trump—the majority included three Trump-appointed justices plus a fourth whose wife was deeply involved in the election-subversion effort.

Even then, the strategy relied on Trump winning the presidential election, which was not a sure bet. Had he lost, the cases would likely have continued, and he might well have lost those. The documents case, though not as grave as Trump’s attack on the basic fabric of the Constitution, was clear-cut in its facts. And in the only criminal case against Trump that did go to a jury—widely viewed as the most tenuous case against him—he was quickly convicted. (Sentencing in that case is now indefinitely paused, also because of Trump’s election.)

But in Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump drew the ideal foil. The man overseeing the two cases against Trump is obsessive about proceduralism. His view was that the best way to restore the justice system, and the Justice Department, after the first Trump presidency was to do everything precisely by the book, no matter how long it took. It took quite a while—Smith was not appointed until November 2022, two months after the paperwork coup began and three months after the FBI seized documents at Mar-a-Lago. By the time Smith brought charges, in summer 2023, the timeline was tight, either for verdicts soon enough to inform voters or to avoid dismissal if a Republican won the presidential election.

This was the problem with Garland’s calculation: It may have temporarily restored the proper function of the Justice Department, but it didn’t win back public approval, nor did it really benefit the Justice Department in court. Garland appointed Smith as special counsel after Trump entered the presidential race, so as to create an appearance of insulation from politics. Little good that did: The Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon delivered a blatantly political ruling throwing the case out because she deemed the appointment unconstitutional.

[David Frum: A good country’s bad choice]

Most important, Garland’s attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding accountable someone who had committed serious crimes in plain sight. And partly because of that, Trump will soon return to the White House with the power and intention to destroy all the independence and careful procedures that Garland took such pains to protect.

Not only that, but the Justice Department will be led by the lawyers who developed Trump’s strategy. His new nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, spoke outside his trial in New York and defended him in his impeachments. His appointees for deputy attorney general and principal associate deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, represented him as defense lawyers. D. John Sauer, who argued the immunity case at the Supreme Court, will be solicitor general, the fourth-ranking post at DOJ.

The lack of accountability for January 6 is an affront to the Constitution. But the lesson that Trump will take from charges being dropped, along with the immunity ruling, is that the system is not capable of holding him accountable for most rules that he violates. The affronts will continue.