The Justice Department recently filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google alleging that the company has been using its monopoly power to hurt competition and consumers through exclusionary agreements with power names such as Apple, Facebook, and Twitter.
Since he took office, President Trump has railed against big companies for their anti-competitive business practices and damaging the relationship between the state, consumer, and Big Tech. Google has been blocking rivals and illegally preserving its status as a search engine monopoly through billion-dollar agreements with companies such as Apple, where they made Google the default search engine on the Safari browser on iPhones.
Google, in recent years, has accounted for nearly 90% of all general search engine queries in the United States and almost 95% of queries on mobile devices. This has unlawfully maintained its monopoly in the market for search services, advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States.
“If the government does not enforce the antitrust laws to enable competition, we could lose the next wave of innovation. If that happens, Americans may never get to see the next Google,” Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said.
Google is also being accused of anti-conservative bias and political censorship. They recently stopped allowing digital ads to be placed on the website of The Federalist, a conservative web magazine, denying its income due to “highly racist comments.”
They told The Federalist to either moderate the comments section, put a firewall around the comments section so ads could not appear there, or eliminate it entirely. Google claimed that they do not allow ads to show up next to harmful content. Most argued that Google was trying to stop ads from appearing next to objectionable material instead.
Google, along with Youtube, have developed systems that capture “problematic” comments 99.8% of the time before they are posted. The Department of Justice argues that American consumers have been forced to accept Google’s policies, privacy practices, and use of personal data, due to the reliance on the internet economy.
“Isn’t the fact that Google acts this way evidence that it perhaps doesn’t feel competition — doesn’t feel threatened even potentially by any competition?” Sen. Mike Lee said.
The slam on Big Tech companies is long overdue. Let the users choose their search engines and keep it simple. Should’ve listened to President Trump a long time ago.
