Newsweek - The Justice Department Should Pursue a Breakup of Google's Monopoly

Open Markets Institute policy analyst, Daniel Hanley, urges the Department of Justice to honor the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust’s Big Tech recommendations and breakup Google. This piece was originally published in Newsweek.

Decades from now, secondary school students in America will learn about Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg—instead of Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie—as the archetypal robber barons.

In its first major monopolization case in 20 years, the Department of Justice has answered Congress's call—issued in a report on the House's 17-month investigation into Big Tech—by filing an antitrust case against Google. The department will target the corporation's dominance in search and digital advertising.

The 450-page House report released on October 6 is not a quick read. But it is the most thorough investigation into a sector of the economy in 50 years. It thoroughly details a surfeit of harms and the tactics that tech monopolists use to corner markets. The report, all but a judicial indictment of the lawless behavior Big Tech has engaged in during the past decade, offers a roadmap for future antitrust litigation.

Significant portions, almost more than the space allocated to Facebook and Apple, focus on analyzing Google's conduct. The committee examined how Google used its market power in instance after instance to favor its own products and services, crush rivals, copy competitors' products, impose arbitrary rules, elbow its way into adjacent industries and lock in users. The Justice Department had more than enough information to build an effective case, and decided to initiate a narrow lawsuit—targeting only Google's dominance in general search and search advertising.

Like the House Report, the Justice Department's complaint against Google exposed how the corporation grew to dominance and used its industrial might to obtain monopoly power in search and digital advertising. The Justice Department focused on two different, but deeply intertwined, harms in its complaint. Through a series of agreements, Google entrenched its monopoly in search with the Android mobile operating system, which in turn helped entrench Google's dominance in digital advertising and mobile search.

Read the full article on Newsweek here.