A month has passed since a judge determined that Alphabet’s Google has controlled a monopoly in the web search space. Now, the tech titan is returning to the legal battlefield to grapple with US prosecutors for the second time over claims that the company’s lucrative advertising business and technology have functioned as a monopoly, charging customers higher ad prices. While Big Tech could be getting its comeuppance, it might be at the expense of liberty.
Google Pursues World Ad Domination
Julia Tarver Wood, an attorney with the Justice Department’s antitrust division, alleged that Google employed various monopoly-building strategies. According to Wood’s opening statement, the corporation eliminated competitors through acquisitions, controlled transactions in the online ad industry, and locked in advertisers and publishers to use its products.
“Google is not here because they are big, they are here because they used that size to crush competition,” she said, based on Reuters reporting at a court in Alexandria, VA. “One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”
However, Google’s lead attorney, Karen Dunn, shrugged off the accusations, telling the court that the case was based on “ancient history.” She likened the legal proceedings – which involved a coalition of several states and were launched on Sept. 9 – to a “time capsule with a Blackberry, an iPod, and a Blockbuster video card.” In addition, Google is expected to assert that the Department of Justice’s crusade will boost advertising costs, slow innovation, and harm businesses’ efforts to attract eyeballs to their websites.
Google is now manufacturing digital tools connecting to competitors’ platforms as the digital ad space transitions to apps and streaming, the defense said. While its tech infrastructure facilitates thousands of online ad sales every second, annual corporate reports suggest the company’s ad division has been slumping. From 2021 to 2023, Google Networks – comprised of AdSense and Google Ad Manager – reported revenues sliding from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023.
The latest case comes soon after the tech juggernaut was defeated in the District of Columbia when a judge ruled that Google’s search engine was a monopoly. The company achieved this aim, the judge stated, by paying companies billions of dollars per year to lock in its products as the default search engine. In a December case, a separate judge concluded that Google’s Android app store was a monopoly.
Overseas, the European Union’s top court agreed with a $2.64 billion fine that favored its native shopping search results over rival services, describing the practice as “discriminatory.” Court of Justice judges argued they wanted to prevent “the maintenance or growth of competition in a market in which the degree of competition is already weakened, precisely because of the presence of one or more undertakings in a dominant position.”
The Government vs Big Tech
Big Tech is not safe. The current regime at the US Department of Justice is targeting Amazon, Google, and Meta platforms (Facebook), alleging that these businesses maintain monopoly power through anti-competitive practices. Some bureaucrats are wrestling with these outlets over disinformation and misinformation pearl-clutching. The federal government is taking on these tech behemoths, from smartphones to online retail, because regulators say these firms are removing choice from the marketplace. At a time when choice seems ubiquitous across the marketplace, it is hard to agree with this supposition.
Web users prefer Google for their search engine needs, with a global market share of around 90%. Microsoft’s Bing accounts for most of the rest. Consumers love the iPhone, which controls 57% of the US smartphone market. Shoppers flooded Amazon for their goods this year as the company is projected to account for more than 40% of retail sales in domestic e-commerce.
Are these businesses perfect? Far from it. Amazon and Google have engaged in censorship for years, targeting conservative voices and collaborating with the Deep State. Apple has been accused of grossly mistreating workers. Still, they have produced exceptional products and services that the public consumes. Remember, there is no such thing as a natural monopoly. The only organizations that have successfully neutered the competition have been propped up through government privileges in the first place.
