Filed under: Politics | Tags: Anti-Trust Law, Dominnce in Search, Hi=Tech Industry, Restraint of Competition
The Department of Justice has filed a major anti-trust lawsuit against Google. The company has been under investigation for almost a year with dozens of Justice Department lawyers working in two groups, each studying a separate line of inquiry. The areas being investigated were Google’s dominance in search, and the company’s control over the online advertising ecosystem. Google controls over roughly 90 percent of web searches worldwide, and many rivals have complained that Google exerts its dominance by making its search and browsing tools defaults on phones running its Android operating system.
The WSJ writes:
The Justice department will allege that Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc. is maintaining its status as the gatekeeper to the internet through an unlawful web of exclusionary and interlocking business agreements that shut out competitors. The government will allege that Google uses billions of dollars collected from advertisements on its platform to pay mobile-phone manufacturers, carriers and browsers, like Apple Inc.’s Safari, to maintain Google as their present, default search engine.
In other words, Google appears on hundreds of millions of American devices with very little opportunity for any aspiring competitor to make inroads. The Justice officials also said the lawsuit will take aim at arrangements in which Google’s search application is preloaded, and cannot be deleted, on mobile phones running its popular Android operating system. The government will allege that Google unlawfully prevents competitors’ search applications from preloaded on phones under revenue-sharing arrangements.
The company has been under investigation for almost a year with dozens of Justice Dept. lawyers working in two groups, each overseeing a different line of inquiry. If new made devices all automatically have Google as their search function, making money gets a lot easier.
Their advertising function needs work. It is always suggested that the big tech companies are collecting so much information about us that they can tailor their offers to what they know about us. If so, they’re not doing a very good job with me. I am a reader. I’m seldom without a book, and if not, happy to read the back of the cereal box. Their ads are unrelated to me, and frequently have me despising Google for always offering me things in which I have zero interest to interrupt the column in which I did have quite a bit of interest. They have polite little notes asking why I deleted this ad, but they don’t leave me enough room to really explain, if I so desired. That turns people off, and leaves them more resistant to responding to any online ad.
Some states are already preparing their own antitrust cases against Google. We welcome ads and offerings, even when we don’t want the product, at least in general, but don’t be bullies. It was just this kind of lawsuit from the Justice Department that broke up the AT&T monopoly. We’ll see if this will persuade the hi tech industry that they need to play fair and mind their manners.
It’s reported that Facebook successfully suppressed the reach of the New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his father and their alleged deal with Burisma by half, compared to anti-Trump stories from other publications. Twitter’s efforts to censor the story actually doubled the attention it received.
I don’t know about you , but I don’t want my views and my political ideas to be formed by companies irresponsibly meddling in politics, and I deeply resent their efforts.
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