This past week the Federal Trade Commission was asked to investigate the data collected by Google on its Android operating system, which powers most of the world’s smartphones. It was a tiny blip in the news cycle but another sign of Washington’s and Europe’s growing concerns about the enormous, largely unchecked power accumulated by tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google over the last two decades. Of the three, Google, which is part of a holding company called Alphabet is the most powerful, intriguing, and omnipresent in our lives. This is how it came to be.
Most people love Google. It’s changed our world, insinuated itself in our lives, made itself indispensable. You probably don’t even have to type Google.com into your computer, it’s often the default setting, a competitive advantage Google paid billions of dollars for. No worry. Google is worth more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars right now and you don’t get that big by accident.
Since going public in 2004, Google has acquired more than 200 companies, expanding its reach across the internet. It bought YouTube, the biggest video platform. It bought Android, the operating system that runs 80% of the world’s smartphones and it bought DoubleClick, which distributes much of the world’s digital advertising, all of this barely raising an eyebrow with regulators in Washington.
Steve Kroft: Were any of those acquisitions questioned by the antitrust division of the Justice Department?
Gary Reback: Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn’t enforcing our antitrust laws. And that’s what’s happened. None of these acquisitions have been challenged.
Gary Reback is one of the most prominent antitrust lawyers in the country widely credited with persuading the Justice Department to sue Microsoft back in the 90s, the last major antitrust case against big tech. Now he is battling Google.
Steve Kroft: You think Google’s a monopoly?
Gary Reback: Oh, yes, of course Google’s a monopoly. In fact they’re a monopoly in several markets. They’re a monopoly in search. They’re a monopoly in search advertising.
Those technologies are less than 25 years old, and may seem small compared to the industrial monopolies like railroads and standard oil a century ago but Reback says there’s nothing small about Google.
“People tell their search engine things they wouldn’t even tell their wives… And that gives the company that controls it a mind-boggling degree of control over our entire society.”
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