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US Treasury Secretary Calls For Google Monopoly Probe (theregister.co.uk)
After a 60 Minutes episode that focused on Google and its effective search monopoly, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called for large tech companies to be investigated for potential antitrust violations. Asked whether Google was abusing its market dominance as a monopoly, Mnuchin told CNBC on Monday "these are issues that the Justice Department needs to look at seriously," and argued that it was important to "look at the power they have" noting that companies like Google "have a greater and greater impact on the economy." The Register reports: Mnuchin's willingness to directly criticize Google and other tech companies and argue that they should be under investigation is just the latest sign that Washington DC is serious about digging in the market power of Big Internet. It is notable that it was 20 years ago, almost to the day, that America finally dealt with another tech antitrust problem when the Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general filed suit -- on May 18, 1998 -- against what was then the most powerful tech company in the country: Microsoft.
Google has been ripe for anti-trust for more than long enough. And for the people that are asking why lets break it down. Google is NOT just a search engine. Visit a few websites and look at who all is running scripts. Most sites will have at least 1 or more of googles analytic, tagging, ads, or static services. Next up is Android... do you use Android? Then you have a relationship with Google like it or not. Play Store is owned by Google or Alphabet whichever.
Do you use Chrome, google owns it. Remember when Microsoft was in trouble for just having internet explorer installed when you got it? The simple fact is that you cannot do nearly anything without Google on the internet. And while that might seem harmless it is not. Google tracks you, tracks what you do, catalogues what you like or it thinks you like. Google keeps bio-metrics and facial recognition of you. Once you are in, you are IN!
Google is in your business, they gather and correlate any an every bit of information about you that it can so it can sell it and use it to appropriate more information about you to sell as well. The problem is not just monopoly, it is anti-trust, and that means google colluding with and influencing or even "forcefully/maliciously influencing" businesses they partner with the same way Walmart and Amazon likes to push distributors and suppliers around with their largess...
If you are a small business... and google tells you that you need to do something or face being delisted or worse... what are you going to do? They are a big player and if you don't play according to their rules they have ways to make life tough for you, no one is going to actually care! Google just simply should NOT be allowed to be a browser, search engine, business data/analytic, application store, ISP, and ad service all at the same time.
Anti-Trust is NOT about keeping people from using google as a search engine, or ads, or as a content provider, or as application store, or as a mobile OS platform. Anti-Trust is about Google owning and operating all of those at the same time and keeping their API's in house just enough so that they are not easy to use by competitors. Because now that google owns most of the logic on the roads, you still have to bend to their will or you just get no service and websites will not serve up content to you unless you accept google!