⭐️ 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.