Google will cut schools off from search if they opt out of AI.

Google announced on Tuesday that schools rejecting its AI tools will also lose access to Google Search. Not as a side effect. As policy.

The mechanics are almost admirably blunt. Google has repackaged its education suite so that administrators can toggle each product on or off individually, which sounds like flexibility until you read the small print: search is integrated with AI, so opting out of AI means opting out of search. For schools that run entirely on Chromebooks and Google Classroom, 150 million students and teachers worldwide, this is roughly equivalent to a water company announcing that households who refuse the new smart meter will still get water, just not from the taps.

Lina Khan, former FTC chair, called it coercion via search monopoly on Tuesday, which is not a phrase Google's education VP used in his blog post about giving schools "control."

The thing is, Google has a reasonable case that blanket AI bans are blunt instruments. Schools probably do need better tools to manage this thoughtfully. That case would land better if the company weren't making it while holding search hostage. New York City and Los Angeles have already banned generative AI in lower schools. What they will make of being told their alternative is no Google at all is not difficult to predict.