3d at 46–47 (“[T]he ability of one competitor to capture [a relatively minor percentage] of the market does not undermine [the dominant firm’s] durable monopoly power protected and perpetuated by barriers to entry.”). As for Neeva, it entered and exited within four years. FOF ¶ 14. Google argues that Neeva’s failure was caused by its subscription-based model, see GRFOF ¶ 25, but that is not the full story. The lack of access to efficient channels of distribution diminished Neeva’s ability to grow its user base and significantly contributed to its demise. FOF ¶ 76; see Multistate Legal Stud., Inc. v. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Legal & Pro. Publ’ns, 63 F.3d 1540, 1555–56 (10th Cir. 1995) (significant entry barriers existed notwithstanding three attempted entries, given that two of them were “largely unsuccessful”). These firms’ experiences confirm that high barriers prevent entry of new competitors.
Second, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has not sufficiently eroded barriers to entry—at least not yet. New technologies may lower, or even demolish, barriers to entry, but such innovation is meaningful only if it can change the market dynamic in the “foreseeable future.” Microsoft, 253 F.3d at 55 (“[W]ere middleware to succeed, it would erode the applications barrier to entry. . . . [But] middleware will not expose a sufficient number of APIs to erode the applications barrier to entry in the foreseeable future.”). Currently, AI cannot replace the fundamental building blocks of search, including web crawling, indexing, and ranking. FOF ¶¶ 114–115. Neeva’s experience is again illustrative. Despite building a search engine enhanced by AI technology, FOF ¶¶ 110–111, Neeva could not ride it to market success. AI may someday fundamentally alter search, but not anytime soon. FOF ¶¶ 114–115.
Third, Google’s early success in dethroning Yahoo as the dominant market player says nothing about the barriers to entry as they exist today. For that same reason, Microsoft’s impression in 2009 that barriers to entry were low in search carries little weight here. See GTB at
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