The U.S. Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit this week against Google, claiming the tech giant engages in anticompetitive behavior in order to preserve monopolies in search and search advertising.
Filed in a Washington, D.C. federal court, the long-awaited case is the first time the federal government has launched such an aggressive challenge against a tech company in decades and the ramifications for Silicon Valley could be far-reaching.
According to the DOJ, Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., preserves its status as a gatekeeper to the Internet through several illicit, exclusionary, and interlocking agreements designed to keep out competitors. The government asserts that Google uses billions of dollars compiled from its advertising services in order to pay mobile-phone manufacturers, carriers, and browsers, such as Apple Inc.’s Safari, to maintain Google as their preset, default search engine.
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Thus, Google has a dominant position on hundreds of millions of American mobile devices, giving little opportunity for any competitor to make make inroads.
Fox notes:
Google owns or controls search distribution channels accounting for about 80% of search queries in the U.S., the lawsuit said. That means Google’s competitors can’t get a meaningful number of search queries and build a scale needed to compete, leaving consumers with less choice and less innovation, and advertisers with less competitive prices, the lawsuit alleged.
Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company has said its competitive edge comes from offering a product that billions of people choose to use each day. Alphabet’s shares opened Tuesday up roughly 1%, ahead of the broader market, after The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the impending suit.
In its defense, Google has long argued that it faces an abundance of competition across various platforms and that its platforms and products help businesses of all sizes reach new customers.
Google’s traditional argument against antitrust accusations has been to emphasize that its services are largely offered to customers at little or no cost, which undercuts the antitrust argument regarding potential price harms to those who use a product from a monopolistic company.
The Justice Department investigated Google for more than a year before filing its lawsuit, and the suit is part of a broader public examination of the role a small group of tech companies play in the lives of Americans, including their ability to shape public opinion.
Should Google lose this case, it could mean the company would be subject to court-ordered changes, resulting in revised operations that might create openings for less powerful rivals. However, the Justice Department did not mention specific remedies in its lawsuit; that is likely to be addressed later in the case. According to one Department official, nothing is off the table. That includes possibly seeking structural changes to the search giant.
On the flip side, a Google victory could be detrimental to the government’s overall scrutiny of Big Tech, possibly undermining the success of other investigations. Such a loss, however, could provide Congress with the impetus to seek a legislative solution.
This new case could take years to resolve and the responsibility for managing the suit will fall upon whichever presidential candidate wins in the November 3 election.
European Union regulators have filed three antitrust complaints against Google and fined it $9 billion, although the results of the action have been perceived as lackluster.
In America, nearly all of the nation’s state attorneys general are separately investigating the corporation, while three other tech giants — Facebook Inc., Apple, and Amazon.com Inc. — also face antitrust scrutiny.
A group of 11 Republican state attorneys general have joined the DOJ’s case, but no Democrats have so far. However, Democrats on a House antitrust subcommittee released a report this month after a 16-month inquiry, saying all four tech giants wield monopoly power. They recommended congressional action. The companies’ chief executives testified before the panel in July but no legislative action has been taken.
But a bipartisan group of states expects to file an antitrust complaint challenging Google’s search practices at a later date, sources say. Per Politico:
That bipartisan group of states expects to file an antitrust complaint challenging Google’s search practices at a later date, the people said. That group, led by Democratic attorneys general in Colorado and Iowa along with Nebraska’s Republican attorney general, has expressed concern about what they view as the Justice Department’s narrow approach to the case, the people said. Filing a separate suit would allow more leverage if the DOJ negotiates a settlement with Google they don’t like, they said.
Absolute power, especially the power to control information, is dangerous when concentrated in any one entity, whether it’s a government or a corporation, and Google and the rest of the Big Tech cartel have been eradicating free speech and free thought in support of their socialist, globalist agenda. But the main anti-trust accusations against Google so far center on aggressive, but legal, business practices, which should not result in an attack by government.
And Google and the other Big Tech companies that are abusing their power have been allowed to abuse it because they are protected by government rules stopping them from being held liable and sued for hosting biased and malicious information — because they are not considered to be “publishers” that are printing their own viewpoint. However, their biased actions show that they aren’t equal-opportunity article-hosting sites, but are acting as publishers. In Google’s case though it doesn’t directly host articles — it searches for articles — it is not providing unbiased searches; it is directing what content readers will receive, so it is acting as a publisher. So these companies could be largely reined in by simply taking away their protections and allowing them to be sued for inaccurate and malicious content.
