Carlos Velazquez

While it's true that Google has become dominant over its competitors, I'm not sure what to think about this. Being the best product technically is, IMHO, no reason to charge a company with being monopolistic even though Google has been subjectively and unfairly enforcing it's terms of service (in case of YouTube) and limiting searches to help the democrats and progressives. There are other search engines users can use.

That area of content "moderation" should be investigated and section 230 should be modified to make these large platforms publishers since they are already editing and deleting political content they don't agree with irrespective of their claims of unproven terms of service violations..

There is at least consistency on the part of the DOJ as it successfully sued Microsoft for monopolistic practices relating to the dominance of the Windows OS.




Tim replies:

I think it appropriate to sue Google over anti-trust. Google accounts for 91.2% percent of all searches online, towering above it's main competitor Bing at 3.8%% and over YANDEX at 1.37%, and Yahoo at 1.24%. And it got that way in no small part by putting financial pressure on a lot of little engines that are now defunct - Dogpile, Ask Jeeves, etc. It systematically gobbled up the market.

The FTC has guidelines for determining if something is a monopoly:

"Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area"

By this definition Google is a super-monopoly; may as well have long coattails and a monocle and Parker Brothers embossed on it.

Also, Google wasn't a product of the free market,but was started and given a boost by the United States government in the first place. And not from the SBA but from a, uh, more sinister outfit.

So the CIA and NSA helped found it to aid them in keeping tabs on Americans, and the corporation has become wholly dominant in controling information in the entire world. I would argue that most definitely fits the bill for antitrust action.

i agree; it should be treated as a publisher. But it probably should be broken up too.

Google is the root of all evil in our modern world, alas.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:32 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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