Why is Google Holding Schools Hostage?

Last week, Google announced that, in response to pressure from parents and educators, it would allow schools to turn off AI tools in their widely used education apps. Cal Newport analyzes this announcement and provides a logical explanation on how to react to this recent news. Chapters: 00:00 Intro: Google's ultimatum to schools 01:59 What's actually going on? 05:23 Can Google really not separate Search from AI? 07:25 The real reasons Google is doing this 08:43 How should we react? Option 1: Sue Google 10:54 Option 2: Switch search engines 13:37 Option 3: Legislation 16:12 Final thoughts: Get out of our classrooms Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Cal Newport?

  Last week, Google announced that in response to pressure from parents and educators that they would no longer have AI tools turned on by default in their popular education apps that are used in over 60,000 K through 12 schools. There was, however, a catch. They said if you do not turn those tools back on, they're not going to give you access to Google search. In other words, Google was holding these schools hostages and saying, if you do not allow our vision of AI in your educational process, if you not let us to put our AI tools into your classroom, so that we, in essence, are having a big say in how kids

• 0:43Cal Newport?

  learn, we're going to turn off basic access to the internet. As you can imagine, this did not go over well. The, I have a quote here, the law professor and anti-monopoly advocate Zephyr Teachout tweeted the following, and I'm reading here. "Google says we are going to force you to break your own rules. You can't have search without AI. New York City must call Google's bluff, kick out search, and refer to case to the AG and DA for illegal tying and abuse of monopoly power." Another tweet I found from a middle school English teacher was a little more blunt. The tweet read, "Bleep Google for marketing these Chromebooks to schools, pushing Google Classroom, and then screwing us over by including that stupid AI overview on every Google

• 1:28Cal Newport?

  search. It's impossible to assign writing questions to Google Classroom without them cheating." Well, look, this felt like a topic that we needed to discuss. I wanted to get into what actually is going on here, why Google is doing this, and how we, as a community, should react. So I thought I would jump on the mic real quick and record a brief episode on exactly those questions. Let's get into it. All right, let's start with the question of what exactly is going on here. I read you a summary early on. I thought we would jump into a representative news article that came out after this announcement was made, so see if we can get a few more details.

• 2:10Cal Newport?

  I'll load this up on the screen here for people who are also watching. I have here an article from NBC News. The headline here is "Google to Shut Off Search for Schools That Opt Out of AI." The subhead here says, "The company said AI-enabled products would be shut off by default for schools, which would also cut off their access to Google Search." All right, let's look a little bit more deeply at what is happening here. So they announced that they would switch off AI products by default. All right, that seems like potentially a good thing. In fact, I can even mark this up with my new fancy software. Boom, seems like a good thing. But those schools that forgo its AI services would also be cut off from Google Search by default.

• 2:55Cal Newport?

  All right, so that's the main story here. The move comes after mounting criticism from advocacy groups and senators about the spread of Google AI services available in the classroom. Until Tuesday, its AI products branded under the Gemini moniker were automatically activated for schools using Google Classroom. Put these threads together, this is interesting what's happening here. Essentially, what this, the article is saying is they were calling the bluff of parents, educators, and legislatures, who said, "We don't like you putting AI tools in the classroom. We all bought these Chromebooks from you. We're using your education apps in our classrooms. But the teachers are telling us, and the parents are telling us, we don't want AI tools in the classroom.

• 3:40Cal Newport?

  It's messing up how we teach, it's messing up pedagogy, it's having a lot of issues." And Google said, "All right, you want us to turn off this new product we're trying to push on your kids? We're going to take our toys and go home." So this is an interesting dynamic. This was not out of nowhere. This was in response. It was basically almost like a petulant response to the educators, parents, and legislators saying, "We don't want these AI tools automatically in our classrooms." They said, "Then we're going to take away the search that basically gives you access to the internet." Let's look a little bit closer in this article, see if there's anything else we need to see. Chris Phillips of Google's Vice President and General Manager of Education said in a blog post announcing a change that access to Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until administrators

• 4:25Cal Newport?

  explicitly turn them on. So you see the trick there. It's like access to Gemini, good, that should be off. Access to Gemini Notebook, good, that should be off. Gemini in Classroom, good, that should be off by default. And Google Search. So they throw in Google Search in the list of the actual AI products that they're having trouble with. Then, this is someone talking on both sides of the mouth, Phillips wrote, "We believe schools should have control over AI in their classrooms and in providing administrators with controls to help them manage their approach." You realize how disingenuous that is. They're saying, "We want you to have control over AI. We are happy to turn it off. We're also going to make the internet not work on your Chromebooks if you do it."

• 5:06Cal Newport?

  But no, you, you have choice now. So that's what's going on here. They have just lumped Google Search, which people have been happily deploying pedagogically on Chromebooks in schools for years, with these brand-new AI tools that people don't like. You have to have one, you have to have the other. All right, so let's move on to the second question. Why, why is Google doing this? Well, they claim, they claim it is unavoidable. I'm going to read you a quote here that comes from actually a New York Times article on the same announcement. Chris Phillips, who we just heard from, said to the Times, "Search and AI are deeply integrated." So the case they're making, the public case Google is making for why they have to turn

• 5:51Cal Newport?

  off search if you want to turn off AI in the classroom, their public case is, "We can't have search without AI. These are integrated together." Search without AI, it's peanut butter without jelly, man, we can't do it. There's no separating them. Is that true? Is Google unable now to separate search results from AI summaries with the sort of ask bar, where you can not only get an overview of unsighted sources, but then you can start asking further questions in a chatbot? They can't pull that apart anymore? The code has been so intertwined that there's no way to go back? Well, there's a, there's a problem with this claim, which is, people do it all the time.

• 6:33Cal Newport?

  So I have up on the screen here a Google search for "turn off Google Search AI," and you'll notice, no AI overview. It is just links. You see links? That's it. Now, how did I do this amazing feat that Google said was impossible? There's actually a little code you can add. Take the URL, do a Google search, take the URL and add to the end ampersand UDM equals 14. Boom, all the search tools are turned off. So they're actually already running a version of Google Search that does not show the AI overview. There's a debugging code you can throw in there to have it display that version instead of the AI overview version. So this idea that they can't separate them, they already are.

• 7:14Cal Newport?

  Add six letters to the end of a URL, and all the AI overview goes off. That's nonsense. They call shenanigans on this idea that you can't pull those two things across. So what are the real reasons why they're putting AI tools together with search, putting them together? There's two that have been brought up that I think are both reasonable. One, Google wants these 60,000 class, schools, think about all the classrooms in those 60,000 schools, all the kids in all those classrooms, all accessing Google Education apps and doing Google searches. If they are all getting automatic AI overviews and maybe interacting with those overviews to get qualifications, I mean, clarifications, that is boost in reportable engagement on their AI tools.

• 7:58Cal Newport?

  It allows Google to say, "Wow, forget those other AI companies. Look at all this engagement we have." The second reason is they want to train a new generation to use Google AI tools instead of ChatGPT or Claude. So if you have it by default in the classroom, you get really used to accessing chatbot-style AI interactions through a Google interface, you will then bring that with you as you go to college and into the real world. So to put this together, they are lying about not being able to give you Google Search without AI results, and they're doing it to try to get new customers and make their engagement numbers look better. They're doing it to make money on the backs of kids.

• 8:43Cal Newport?

  All right, well, this brings us to the third and perhaps most important point of this discussion. How should we react? Well, first of all, I'll say, I don't know what's going to happen with this in the near future. This all might be moot. Okay, so it's possible that even by the time you hear this episode, Google will have changed its stance. There's a lot of pressure on them that's building day by day. People are not happy about this. But let's go forward under the assumption that they have kept this policy in place. What then should we do? I have three options that I want to bring up. These are all options I've seen suggested. The first option is sue Google. Former FTC Chair Lena Kahn has been among many others, including, as we saw this every teachout, I think Randy Weigarten has talked about this as well, is we should bring an

• 9:28Cal Newport?

  antitrust suit across Google. You can't use one tool to try to force a group into using another tool. This was like the case that the government brought against Microsoft in the 90s about using its Microsoft Windows to force you to use Internet Explorer. So that's a possibility. There could be a legal result that says you can't take away Google search for people who don't want the AI tools. It's unclear if the legal, if this legal strategy, however, is actually going to work, in particular because of a precedent that was set last month, the US District Court for the District of Columbia, there was a ruling in the Penske Media versus Google case where the case was actually thrown out

• 10:09Cal Newport?

  by the judge. It was dismissed in part, I'm looking at the exact wording here, because Google argued, the judge says, the plaintiffs hadn't established that Google search and AI overview were two different products. So the district court said, it's reasonable, or at least the plaintiffs have not done a good enough job of actually saying these are two separable products as opposed to one product. So if the court sees them as a connected product, it's harder than to have the court force Google to parse the product back. Now, we know, of course, by just our experiment that that's nonsense, but courts are dealing with legal standards and not necessarily with a technical intuition. All

• 10:51Cal Newport?

  right. So what's the other thing you could do? Well, you could switch browsers. This is what I think schools should do right away. The right away, what you do is switch over to DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is a browser that is built with privacy in mind, a search engine, rather, not browser. I don't mean browser. You can do this in the Chrome, you know, Chrome is what comes on these Chromebooks. It's hard to switch that. But in Chrome, instead of going to google.com to search, you can go to duckduckgo.com. This is a browser that is meant, I keep saying browser. It is a search engine that is meant with privacy in mind. It does not collect data from your searches to try to build a data profile of you that it can use to sell to advertisers or try to personalize your searches in the future.

• 11:36Cal Newport?

  DuckDuckGo says, we're not going to do that. We're not gathering your data to profile you. We're just giving you search results. They have version of DuckDuckGo with privacy preserving AI, but more importantly, they're happy to give you a version of their search engine with no AI summaries or AI interaction at all. You just go to the URL, noai.duckduckgo.com, and then you are at what is just a normal browser. In fact, I'm going to type this in, you know, as we're here live. Let's just look at this. I'm just want to make sure this exists. Noai.duckduckgo. I'll put it up on the screen here. Remember that back when search, okay, you just have a search screen. So I don't know, what are we gonna

• 12:18Cal Newport?

  type in here? Cal Network, hero to mini. And you know what? Search has come up. No, no privacy, no AI overviews, no summaries. I am a little disappointed that there's not actually pictures of Cal Network, but it's just a bunch of web results. A lot of this is like Cal Networks, actually like California Networks or whatever. It's just search results like Google was six years ago. So that exists. You can use that right away in a Chrome browser on a Chromebook. And there you go. No AI overview, reasonable search, maybe not as good as a fully like hyper tuned Google search, but do we need our kids to have the best

• 12:59Cal Newport?

  possible search? I don't think so. Make them work a little bit. There's even a deployment guide that DuckDuckGo provides for administrators who have managed Chromebooks like at a school for how to set this up to be the default search tool, so that if the kid like types in a search query into the browser address bar, it goes to the noai.duckduckgo instead of to Google search. So you can actually just stop using Google search. This is what schools should do, I think, in the near future. Double call their bluff. They called your bluff by saying, sure, you want AI turned off? We're taking search. We're taking our toys and going home. And you can say, that's fine. Turn off the AI. We don't need Google search. We'll use another search engine. And it works well enough. The third option

• 13:41Cal Newport?

  is legislative. I don't know if people realize this. I'm working on an article right now about this. So I've been, I've been kind of up to my ears in this movement that's happening right now. But there has been during the year of 2026, a major legislative push that has been really instigated and fueled by parental activism about technology in the classroom. Now, I'm not talking about the phones. That was, that was 2025. 2025 is when we saw the explosion of legislations about smartphones in the classroom. And now you have 38 states where you have a state level law that has at least some sort of restrictions on where you can and cannot use smartphones in the classroom. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about Chromebooks. I'm talking about iPads, screens that you're

• 14:22Cal Newport?

  given by the teacher to use in the classroom. In 2026, resistance to the amount of time and what students were doing on those screens exploded. There are 16 different state legislatures that have, at the very least, proposed and in many cases actually passed laws or bills about reducing or restricting how much of that quote unquote ed tech can be used in the classroom. The most common strategy is to have screen time limits. This grade, the kids cannot have more than this many minutes looking at a Chromebook or iPad, no matter what you're doing with it. You got to figure out how to fill the rest of the time. These grades, you can't use it at all. Often, these bills require an explicit AI plan. Here's

• 15:06Cal Newport?

  how we use or don't use AI in our schools. So there is a legislative pressure that's coming back about the use of these type of tools in the classroom. This type of pressure can easily also involve things like AI pressure on AI overviews, AI summaries, that this, this cannot be, you know, available by default to students. It can only be used in certain circumstances. And that type of pressure, man, Google is like, wow, we might have to change what we're doing here, or state laws will essentially drive, you know, these Chromebooks out of these schools. And they're nervous about it. It's $164 billion a year industry ed tech, and Google has a big piece of that pie. And as they see more and more schools

• 15:50Cal Newport?

  are saying, do we really need these? Let's restrict the time. Google has to realize they're on an edge here of trying to bully these schools into using their latest technology to create new consumers and make their stock price go better. But the other edge of that knife edge, the other side of it is these schools could say, you know what? We'll take our toys and go home. We don't need your Chromebooks. So I think legislation is also a, an avenue here that makes a big deal. All right. So let me just step back and summarize this real quick, because I, you know, I do not like this behavior. As someone who studies human flourishing and technological world, this is not the type of behavior I like to see. And I don't think people are going to stand for it. Because what is actually happening in these classrooms, if you look closer, I read a lot of teachers' accounts about this

• 16:34Cal Newport?

  particular issue. Google is basically saying, we are deciding how your students should use AI. And so when they put these interactive AI overviews into the Google searches, the kids just started using it for all of their homework. Even if like, I'm just trying to find a source, it would be like, well, I'll summarize it, bad facts, hallucinations. But also, what are you trying to write? I could just give it to you right now. Trying to get the kids in that mindset of cognitive surrender, where stop thinking, let the machine do it for you, whether it's right or wrong, doesn't matter. Let it do it for you. And Google said, oh, but here's what we're going to do to respond to people being upset by that. We're introducing our own pedagogical AI tools, AI in the classroom. We have our

• 17:15Cal Newport?

  own ideas about how your child should interact with AI, to work with AI, to do their schoolwork, and you have no say over it. We're going to deploy that. So Google's like, let us take over pedagogical thinking in your classrooms. We will figure out how AI is going to work. Let me tell you who does not want, like 75 nerds in Menlo Park, California, to be in charge of their kids' technology related education. Every parent in America. We're done with that. Did you see the last election? Big tech has become the bastion of elitism. We are done with this idea of these ultra rich, socially stunted nerds telling us what's

• 17:58Cal Newport?

  going to happen to our jobs, what's going to happen to life on earth, coming out and doing like doom trolling, saying, yeah, I might, we've got a 33.3% chance that we're going to kill you all. And I'm not going to stop because I blogged about this 10 years ago. I'm the new god now. Tired of this. And no, we're not going to let Google come into our classrooms and say, we've invented education tools and we'll revolutionize AI. We don't want education with our AI. We don't trust you to do it. You've lost that trust. All right. So I don't mean to get hot and bothered. I try to be more journalistic and repertorial when I cover these issues. But this one, look, I have three kids in school.

• 18:39Cal Newport?

  I have three kids in K-8 school right now. Get out of our classroom. Don't try to take schools hostage. Google, this is the wrong time to call the bluff of the American parent because they're already tired of you, and they're just looking for one more excuse. To let you be in charge of our kids' education is like letting the shark from Jaws be in charge of the junior lifeguard program on Amity Island. We're not dumb. We're not going to let that happen. I don't think you understand the sentiment against you right now. If I have to guess, this issue will probably be resolved, maybe not long after this episode airs. But I thought it was something we need to talk about. All right. Hope you enjoy that. Talk to you soon. Today's episode was produced and mastered by Jesse Miller. Nate Meckler provided research

• 19:22Cal Newport?

  and newsletter support. The video was edited by Ben Crane and Rob Montz. The theme music is adapted from an original composition by Jay Kirstens. For weekly ideas from me to show up in your inbox, sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com.