Amazon have mistreated third-party sellers. Apple's app store fees and policies are anti-competitive. Facebook have sought to eliminate future rivals through targeted acquisitions.
And Google, instead of competing on the quality of their search results, bought their success – they pay billions of dollars a year to device manufacturers like Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung and browser developers like Mozilla and Opera to be their default search engine and in many cases to prohibit them from dealing with Google's competitors.
As a result, Google effectively own or control search distribution channels accounting for nearly 90 percent of all general search engine queries in the United States and almost 95 percent of searches on mobile.
In other words, Google harm competition and prevent rivals from gaining a meaningful audience.
And so, the US government finally decided to do something about the elephant in the room. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice sued Google, in the most aggressive legal challenge to the power and influence of Big Tech in more than two decades.
The much-anticipated lawsuit could lead to the break-up of an iconic company that has become all but synonymous with the Internet and assumed a primary role in the day-to-day lives of billions of people around the globe.
Such an outcome is far from assured, however, and the case is likely to take years to resolve. The last time the US took up the cudgels was when it sued Microsoft for anti-competitive practices in 1998. A settlement left the company intact, though the government's prior foray into Big Tech anti-trust – the 1974 case against AT&T – led to the breakup of the Bell System.
Google called the lawsuit "deeply flawed", adding that people "use Google because they choose to – not because they're forced to or because they can't find alternatives" – and insisting that it "would do nothing to help consumers".
No comments:
Post a Comment