David Shepardson and Bryan Pietsch for Reuters:
Attorneys general from 48 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have opened an antitrust probe into big tech companies that focuses on Alphabet’s Google, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton formally announced on Monday.
Paxton leads the probe, he said, which will focus on Google’s advertising business. California and Alabama are not part of the investigation.
States on Monday formally requested documents from Google on its advertising business, Paxton said… Google specifically has faced accusations that its web search service, which has become so dominant that it is now a verb, leads consumers to its own products at the cost of competitors. There have also been complaints of potentially anti-competitive behavior in how it runs the advertising side of its business.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, this is the search engine market share for August 2019 (source: StatCounter):
• Google: 92.37%
• Bing: 2.63%
• Yahoo: 1.8%
• Baidu: 1.1%
• DuckDuckGo: 0.55%
With this unprecedented power, platforms have the ability to redirect into their pockets the advertising dollars that once went to newspapers and magazines. No one company should have the power to pick and choose which content reaches consumers and which doesn’t. — MacDailyNews, November 9, 2017
If you haven’t already, give DuckDuckGo a try! https://duckduckgo.com