Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Donald Harrison, president of global partnerships and corporate development for Google, testifies via video conference during a Senate Antitrust Subcommittee hearing, September 15, 2020.
The first search term that appears for me is “the regulation of the concentration of economic power.” And no company epitomizes concentrated economic power quite like Google itself, with its domination of search, of ads, and its use of its privileged role to squash competitors.
As it happens, the Justice Department is on the verge of filing an epic antitrust case against Google, which stands to be the biggest such suit since the Microsoft case of the 1990s. The government did not succeed in breaking up Microsoft, but the settlement of the case in 2004 compelled Microsoft to rein in some of its predatory tactics.
As Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley wait to see if the Google suit is filed, Google’s allies and publicists have been doing their best to confuse public opinion. According to Google-funded organizations, the case is a hurry-up political hit job by Trump AG Bill Barr, an all-purpose villain, supposedly because Google and other Big Tech companies lean Democratic.
This is nonsense. The Federal Trade Commission has been investigating Google on the merits on and off since 2011. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly called for action against Google’s monopoly excesses. The Democratic chair of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, David Cicilline, recently said of Google, “It used its surveillance over web traffic to identify competitive threats and crush them. It has dampened innovation and new business growth and it’s dramatically increased the price of accessing users on the internet.”
Earlier this month, 13 leading progressive groups including the Open Markets Institute, the Working Families Party, Our Revolution, and the Center for Digital Democracy sent a letter to the nation’s state attorneys general, urging them to join the litigation against Google.
This, however, does not make Bill Barr a good guy. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Barr may let this suit go forward for all the wrong reasons. But the time is long overdue to deal with Google’s excesses.
