Q.After you read Why the Government Is Suing Google New York
Times article, please provide a summary of the article and your own
assessment of the merit of this case Organize your initial response
in heading and subheadings and different paragraphs
Why the Government Is Suing Google
Maybe all Google needed to keep from acting like a monopoly
was more effective government oversight.
The U.S. government sued Google on Tuesday claiming that the
company is an illegal monopoly. My colleagues called it “the
government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s
market power in a generation.”
This legal case is going to be loud, confusing and will most
likely drag on for years. More confusing lawsuits against Google
from U.S. states are probably coming, too. What will be most
important to remember are the big questions at the heart of this:
Does Google break the rules to stay on top? And if so, does that
hurt all of us?
So, yes, this is about politics and legal minutiae, but
ultimately this case boils down to whether the technology that we
use could be better, and whether the American economy could be more
fair.
And through all this drama, I have a lingering question: Is
the government suing Google because the government itself wasn’t
doing its job?
All of the activity that the Justice Department now says is
evidence of Google maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and
search advertising has been known for years and could possibly have
led to a crackdown by agencies like the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission and the Justice Department. Those agencies are
responsible for keeping watch on companies for signs of potentially
abusive behavior.
And yet, under both Democratic and Republican presidents in
recent years, Google faced few substantive government enforcement
actions for anything it did that made the company stronger and
harder to unseat. If you let your kid act up again and again
without consequences, should you be surprised that it keeps
happening?
In Tuesday’s lawsuit, the Justice Department accused Google of
shutting out rivals through tactics like paying phone companies and
others to ensure that Google’s web search engine has a prominent
position on Android smartphones and on iPhones. This behavior, the
government lawsuit said, holds back competition that could make
better products for all of us.
But this activity hasn’t been a hush-hush conspiracy cooked up
in underground bunkers at Google headquarters.
We’ve known for years that Google pays Apple billions of
dollars each year to make sure its search engine is the one that
people encounter on their iPhones and in the Safari web browser.
It’s not a secret that Google had contracts with phone companies
that required them to include Google apps on smartphones and make
its search engine practically inescapable.
The European Union’s antitrust regulators fined Google over
similar tactics in 2018. The E.U. required changes to Google’s
behavior, although some competitors have said they are
ineffective.
Reading the U.S. government’s lawsuit, I was mostly left
wondering why it’s happening now. Almost all the substantive
allegations about Google abusing its power could have been made —
and were — years ago. The E.U. case, which started in 2015, dredged
up very similar facts.
Novelty is not required to prove that Google is an illegal
monopoly, of course. But still, if the lawsuit is treading on
familiar ground, why did it take so long?
And again, could the F.T.C. or the Justice Department have
stepped in to ask hard questions about this behavior before now?
Would that have slowed Google and prevented the need for a Big Bang
and risky lawsuit to try to change what the company does? (Google
said on Tuesday that the government’s lawsuit is “deeply flawed,”
and that people use its online services because they choose
to.)
There are, to be sure, complex legal questions involved here.
The government can’t just declare that Google stop doing stuff like
this just because it makes the company stronger. But I do wonder if
more effective oversight by every corner of the government in the
last decade would have done with less fuss what this antitrust
lawsuit is trying to do — kept Google from tilting the game to its
advantage.
In recent conclusions of a congressional investigation into
the power of big technology companies, lawmakers who normally
disagree about everything did agree on one thing: America’s
antitrust watchdogs have fallen down on the job. (To be fair,
Congress should shoulder part of the burden here. It writes the
laws that dictate what the F.T.C. and Department of Justice do, and
it sets their budgets.)
House members said that the F.T.C. and others too often left
unchallenged Big Tech’s pattern of getting more powerful by
acquiring competitors, and that the agencies did not crack down
when these companies broke the law and their word. I couldn’t agree
more.
For one small example, look at what happened in 2013. The
F.T.C. said that it was getting harder for people to tell the
difference between regular web search results and paid web links on
Google’s search engine. This risked hurting both those trying to
use the site, and companies that had no choice but to spend more
money with Google to get noticed.
The F.T.C. urged Google and others to make it more clear when
people were seeing web search results rather than paid links.
What happened since that warning in 2013? Not very much. If
anything, it’s gotten even more difficult to tell Google’s ads from
everything else.
That’s one small example, and that activity wasn’t highlighted
in the Justice Department lawsuit against Google. But it shows that
big companies — if their behavior is unchecked — will continue to
test the limits of their power.
For more from my colleagues: Steve Lohr explains what you need
to know about the lawsuit against Google. And Brian X. Chen writes
about how Google’s changes over the years have kept us in the
company’s infinite loop.