At present, search giants Google We are facing several antitrust lawsuits from the state and federal levels in the United States. In the last two days alone, Google has received two antitrust lawsuits, bringing the total number of antitrust lawsuits against the search giant to three. The other one was launched by the Department of Justice in October this year.
In the latest lawsuit filed on Thursday, attorneys general from 35 states accused Google of using anti competitive behavior to maintain its monopoly position in search business and advertising. Before these lawsuits, Google's competitors, legislators and activists have been constantly criticizing Google and Facebook And other major technology companies, accusing them of using anti competitive means to maintain their monopoly position for many years.
The three antitrust lawsuits against Google were initiated by state and federal agencies, and their respective perspectives are slightly different. These actions may last for several years, and over time, state level actions may be combined with federal level actions. Sally Hubbard, executive strategy director of the Open Markets Institute and author of Monopolies Suck, believes that these lawsuits may eventually lead to Google being split into several smaller companies. He said, "I don't think this is a battle related to consumer rights - this is a battle related to whether Google is illegal."
Google Manipulation Search Lawsuit
This latest lawsuit is similar to the lawsuit launched by the US Department of Justice in October, focusing on Google's search business. It claims that Google uses three forms of anti competitive behavior to maintain its monopoly position in search business and advertising. These anti competitive behaviors include: Apple And other competitors reached an agreement to set Google as the default search engine; Use its dominant search advertising marketing tools to defeat market competitors; And display search results unfavorable to professional search platforms such as tourism/restaurants. According to the report, "Google uses the dependence of these professional search platforms on them to treat them in a different way from other business participants, thus limiting their ability to obtain customers."
Although this lawsuit, like the lawsuit of the Ministry of Justice, is focused on search business and advertising monopoly, the lawsuit at the state level is based on the lawsuit of the Federal Ministry of Justice and has a broader scope than the lawsuit of the Ministry of Justice. "The lawsuit provides more evidence of Google's extensive anti competitive behavior, which has harmed consumers, advertisers and competition," wrote the petition
Google responded to the lawsuit in a blog post by Adam Cohen, its economic policy director. The post said that changes to Google's search engine would harm the interests of consumers. The post wrote: "(This lawsuit) suggested that we should not try to make search better, but on the contrary, it should be more useless to users." "This lawsuit requires changing the design of Google search, requiring us to highlight online intermediaries and replace direct links with enterprises."
The lawsuit was supported by state attorneys general from both parties, while the lawsuit of the Federal Department of Justice was only supported by state attorneys general from the Republican Party.
"Google is at the crossroads of our numerous digital economy fields. It uses its advantages to illegally suppress competitors, monitor almost every aspect of our digital life, and profit billions of dollars from it," said New York Attorney General Letia James, a Democrat who helped lead the lawsuit.
This lawsuit is good news for the digital media industry. Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, the digital media industry association, said in a statement, "The lawsuit highlights the widespread concern of both parties about Google's anti competitive behavior. We are pleased to see that almost every state is stepping up its efforts to crack down on Google's anti competitive behaviors, which are aimed at consolidating Google's dominance and sacrificing the interests of publishers, advertisers and consumers. "
Google Advertising Technology Monopoly Case
Another latest lawsuit was launched yesterday by 10 Republican state attorneys general. Compared with the lawsuit mentioned above, this lawsuit mainly accuses Google of anti competitive behavior in its advertising technology. Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, led the investigation against Google. A few hours before the lawsuit was launched, Paxton Twitter A video was released on the website to announce the lawsuit. He said in the video: "Google has repeatedly used its monopoly power to control pricing, conduct market collusion and manipulate bidding behind the scenes, which is a serious illegal act."
The lawsuit accuses Google of taking a variety of anti competitive actions to establish and maintain its monopoly position in the digital advertising market and keep competitors out. It also accused Google and Facebook of illegally agreeing not to compete with each other. This may be a particularly damaging accusation for the two companies - Section 1 of the Sherman Anti trust Law prohibits collusion between enterprises in this way, and such litigation cases are often easier to provide evidence in court.
The lawsuit was jointly initiated by the Republican Attorney General of Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Kentucky and Texas. The lawsuit said, "In addition to representing the buyers and sellers of online advertising, Google also operates the largest digital exchange. In this electronic trading market, Google also plays the role of pitcher, batter and referee."
This is similar to the New York Stock Exchange, which controls the trading of stocks. Hubbard said, "If the market operates normally, Google should not obtain some information. In other industries, this situation is intolerable."
Google spokeswoman Julie McAlister said to the outside world that "Attorney General Paxton's claim on advertising technology is worthless", and Google "will strongly defend itself in court and will not accept his baseless allegations."
This is the first lawsuit focusing on Google's dominant position in the field of advertising technology. More specifically, Google used its market power to "extract high taxes from the advertising revenue flowing to online publishers and content producers (such as online newspapers, cooking websites, etc.)", so these enterprises had to pass these costs on to consumers, which damaged their interests.
Last year, Google earned nearly $162 billion in revenue, most of which came from advertising. According to relevant data, Google controls nearly one-third of digital advertising spending in the United States. Some media people said that Google's advertising tools dominated all aspects of advertising production, making it remain dominant. These media people also explained in detail the operation of Google's advertising technology and the reasons why publishers and competitors have complained about Google's advertising technology.
Antitrust litigation at the federal level
In addition to the first two antitrust lawsuits initiated by the state attorney general, the federal level took similar legal actions as early as October this year. At that time, the US Department of Justice and 11 states jointly launched a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of using its dominant position in the search field to maintain its monopoly position in many fields, including advertising. The lawsuit also claimed that Google paid some companies to exclude other competitors in order to maintain its leading position. For example, Google pays Apple billions of dollars every year to make its search engine the default search engine of Safari browser.
The US Justice Department said that Google monopolized the US search market and controlled 90% of the market share. Google search is free in form - but in fact, consumers pay for services in the form of providing personal data to Google - the government's antitrust litigation is based on the idea that Google's monopoly position leads to reduced competition, which leads to a decline in the quality of products and services.
Marc Raimondi, spokesman of the Ministry of Justice, said at the press briefing: "If the government does not implement the anti-monopoly law to promote competition, we may lose the next wave of innovation Sina Tide. If the monopoly is not broken, Americans will probably never see the birth of the next Google. "
Google is not the only major technology company facing government regulatory review. Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 48 states also filed a lawsuit against Facebook, claiming that its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp damaged the interests of consumers and was anti competitive. Before the lawsuit, the Democratic Party submitted a 400 page report to the House Judicial Anti monopoly Committee, Amazon Apple, Facebook and Google are the central topics of this report. The report believes that the four largest technology companies in the world have abused their functions as industry guardians, and new regulations should be established to restrict these large companies.
The introduction of the report points out: "To put it simply, those start-ups that were once dynamic, not promising, but had the courage to challenge the status quo have now become the monopoly enterprises we saw in the era of oil and railway tycoons."
Whether these lawsuits will bring meaningful changes remains to be seen. As we all know, it is difficult to win an antitrust case. Some argue that it is difficult to prove that the dominance of these large technology companies actually harms the interests of consumers. For example, Google has provided a powerful search tool and simplified the digital advertising market, which has benefited many users. In any case, the above-mentioned antitrust lawsuits show that the US government at least believes that there is an opportunity for change.
Finally, this kind of lawsuit will not have a result soon. Government Microsoft The prosecution started in 1998 and lasted for several years. The current situation is quite different from that at that time, and it is difficult to compare. In view of the huge role played by these large technology companies in today's life, the above-mentioned lawsuits will be larger and more complex.
