Is Google building a chokepoint across data, chatbots, and payments?

Matt Stoller, writing in BIG, argues that after "Judge Amit Mehta ruled badly on the search antitrust suit," Google "is trying to build out an entire 'agentic economy'" on the same advertising-funded logic that made search "corrupt... from the very beginning." The mechanism he describes is a rollup: Google rolled up personal data, distribution of chatbots, and built partnerships with Apple, as well as virtually every retailer and payment network, in an attempt to set pricing across the economy. He treats everyday features as early instances already live — "when you login to Gmail, Google is now summarizing your email. When you search, Google is summarizing the web" — calling these "prototypes of agents" that "will improve," and warns that the combination gives Google "the data and context to create a chokepoint that is even more dominant than the one it has today."

Stoller's reasoning ties the antitrust loss directly to the agent strategy: rather than being constrained by losing the search case, Google is using agentic AI to extend the same three-party structure — user, advertiser, platform — across email, retail, and payments simultaneously, so a single company ends up positioned as what he calls "the central planner of the economy." The open question he raises at each layer is the same one he raises for agents generally: "are they operating on your behalf? On behalf of the advertisers who pay Google? Or on Google's behalf?" He names Anthropic and "a host of Chinese AI models" as having comparable ambitions to "capture the agent space," but treats Google's position — owning data, distribution, and payment-network partnerships at once — as the most advanced version of the chokepoint risk.

This sharpens the brand-side advice in Will brands succeed by building their own AI shopping agents?: where Accenture frames the agent as a decision layer brands must win over, Stoller argues that when one company (Google) controls the data, distribution, and payment rails behind that decision layer, becoming the agent of choice stops being a competitive strategy and becomes dependence on a single chokepoint. It also gives a market-structure cause for the dynamic in Why do consumers delay adopting agentic search?: that note's platform-revenue incentive is, on Stoller's account, not incidental but the deliberate extension of a chokepoint strategy already tested in search advertising.

The piece does not analyze the Mehta ruling's substance, quantify the terms of Google's retailer or payment-network partnerships, or demonstrate that the rollup is succeeding commercially rather than merely underway. Its claim is a prediction built on pattern-matching to Google's search-advertising history, not a measured assessment of market share or regulatory outcome, and the implication it supports is a case for scrutinizing the rollup now, before the chokepoint it describes is established rather than emergent.