The U.S. Justice Department today filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market power to fend off rivals. The DOJ’s antitrust division announced Tuesday that it is suing Alphabet Inc. over antitrust law violations surrounding its search engine, saying the company has become “the monopoly gatekeeper of the internet.”
The landmark case alleges Google abused its market-dominant position and stifled competitors, specifically citing its exclusionary distribution agreements with Apple Inc. and other technology companies that made its search engine the default option on mobile devices and browsers… Eleven Republican state attorneys general signed on to the case.
For months now, we’ve known that the DOJ has been preparing an antitrust case against Google. What we didn’t know was how far-reaching it would be. There was speculation that regulators would rush out a half-baked complaint to meet a political deadline. It turns out, the government is pursuing the tech giant full-on by targeting the company’s crown-jewel Google search engine. That’s good, because the situation demands it.
Notably, no Democratic state attorneys generals have signed on to this DOJ lawsuit, but that’s likely because they want to file a broader complaint later. The DOJ signaled as much on a press call Tuesday, adding that the attorneys’ hesitation to join the suit wasn’t for lack of support of the arguments. Unlike the large divergence between Republicans and Democrats on social media regulation, the two parties’ positions on Google’s overreach and the need for antitrust remedies aren’t far apart.
Where do things go from here? I expect a growing bipartisan consensus to form against Google…
MacDailyNews Take: This will take years (and should have begun years ago), but, hopefully, this is finally the beginning of a road that will lead to effective restraints on Google’s anticompetitive monopoly abuses!