New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani blasted Google’s decision to block its search engine from schools that restrict its AI features.
“Google is trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools,” he wrote in a statement on social media. “No company should have the power to dictate how we teach our children. »
“Our public schools exist to serve students,” Mamdani added, “not to increase the profit margins of big tech.”
Google announced Tuesday that it would disable AI features in its software for students unless school administrators specifically choose to enable them — something educators have requested.
But with this apparent act of goodwill, Google introduced a surprise: If schools decided to restrict all of its AI features, it would also disable their access to Google Search. In a statement to New York Timeswho first reported the decision, Google vice president of education Chris Phillips offered little explanation, saying “search and AI are deeply integrated.”
Strictly speaking, that’s true, and by being intentionally vague, Google is making this seem like a technical issue and not a deliberate choice to weed out AI-wary schools. Its search engine is now equipped with AI features. And even before the post-2022 chatbot boom, the company had long used AI algorithms to improve its search results.
Research and AI are therefore indeed “deeply integrated”, but does it have to be this way? Before chatbots, the way Google Search integrated AI still encouraged you to do the actual act of searching for information instead of giving you complete answers. Even its old-fashioned “featured snippets” that appeared above search results extracted elements from a web page verbatim, clearly linking back to the original source and ensuring that nothing was lost in the AI’s hallucination.
Since then, Google has added its AI previews and a full-fledged AI mode, transforming the experience into something more akin to using a chatbot. Now when you search on Google, the top of the page presents an AI summary and chat window that will automatically summarize long answers to even the most specific queries, presenting them with authority despite the fact that the AI is notoriously prone to hallucinating. A casual user, or the average student, has almost no reason to seek out real sources of information.
This worries parents and educators, who want their children to develop critical thinking skills and the ability to research problems independently. The problem is only exacerbated when a child has access to a full-fledged chatbot product, such as Google Gemini. Along with the wealth of studies suggesting that reliance on these tools impacts critical thinking, many school districts are hesitant to trust students with technology that has become synonymous with effortless cheating on school assignments.
Mamdani has made AI in education a key part of his agenda. In September, he announced a one-year moratorium on New York City schools using AI in the classroom, a policy he called “the most comprehensive of its kind in the country.”
For Google, amid all this concern, telling schools that it will now cut off their access to research if they restrict AI seems like an unusually malicious move. It is by far the dominant search engine and most users’ gateway to the Internet. His bargaining power in this confrontation with schools is incalculably outsized – hence Mamdani’s accusation that he is using “monopoly power to impose AI on our public schools.”
A federal judge ruled in 2024 that Google held an illegal monopoly on the search engine market and used its dominance to exclude its competitors. There’s a compelling argument that it’s now doing something similar with schools, hoping it can bully them into submission to ensure that this generation of kids will be future customers by getting them hooked on its AI ecosystem.
Learn more about education: The tech industry’s aggressive efforts to integrate AI into schools are turning into a disaster
Gn bussni
