From Android Authority, September 30:
....MORE
- The US Department of Justice is expected to sue Google as soon as next week.
- It’s believed that the lawsuit accuses Google of putting search rivals at a disadvantage.
- The department is also said to be investigating search advertising under Google’s search box.
Google has faced several legal challenges in recent years regarding its search and advertising business, and it looks like the US is next in line to take aim at the company.
According to Reuters, citing three sources familiar with the matter, the US Department of Justice is set to file a lawsuit against Google as soon as next week. It’s alleged that the department is also calling on state attorneys general to sign onto the suit.
The lawsuit reportedly accuses Google of trying to put search rivals such as Bing at a disadvantage. More specifically, it’s claimed that Google deprives rivals of “the data about users and user preferences” that these rivals need to improve their services and advertising.
Reuters says the Department of Justice is also focusing on search advertising that appears under Google’s search box, noting that Google controls these search boxes and the associated tools.
Recent actions against Google
This wouldn’t be the first time Google came under fire for its search and advertising practices, as the European Commission levied a €1.49 billion (~$1.7 billion) fine against Google last year for online advertising abuse....
August 2019
What Alphabet Really Fears: Why Google Won't Make Google Search the Default in Android For Europe
This is a half-measure that will do nothing to curb the GOOG's power. It almost looks like regulatory capture. After the jump, the proposal that would work....
*****
... And from Dr. Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief at Psychology Today,
search-engine researcher, Huffington Post contributor etc. writing at
BloombergBusinessweek, July 15: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
The tech giant doesn’t have to be dismantled. Sharing its crown jewel might reshape the internet.
Recognition is growing worldwide that something big needs to be done about Big Tech, and fast.
More than $8 billion in fines have been levied against Google by the European Union since 2017. Facebook Inc., facing an onslaught of investigations, has dropped in reputation to almost rock bottom among the 100 most visible companies in the U.S. Former employees of Google and Facebook have warned that these companies are “ripping apart the social fabric” and can “hijack the mind.”
Adding substance to the concerns, documents and videos have been leaking from Big Tech companies, supporting fears—most often expressed by conservatives—about political manipulations and even aspirations to engineer human values.
Fixes on the table include forcing the tech titans to divest themselves of some of the companies they’ve bought (more than 250 by Google and Facebook alone) and guaranteeing that user data are transportable.
But these and a dozen other proposals never get to the heart of the problem, and that is that Google’s search engine and Facebook’s social network platform have value only if they are intact. Breaking up Google’s search engine would give us a smattering of search engines that yield inferior results (the larger the search engine, the wider the range of results it can give you), and breaking up Facebook’s platform would be like building an immensely long Berlin Wall that would splinter millions of relationships.
With those basic platforms intact, the three biggest threats that Google and Facebook pose to societies worldwide are barely affected by almost any intervention: the aggressive surveillance, the suppression of content, and the subtle manipulation of the thinking and behavior of more than 2.5 billion people.
Different tech companies pose different kinds of threats. I’m focused here on Google, which I’ve been studying for more than six years through both experimental research and monitoring projects. (Google is well aware of my work and not entirely happy with me. The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Google is especially worrisome because it has maintained an unopposed monopoly on search worldwide for nearly a decade. It controls 92 percent of search, with the next largest competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, drawing only 2.5%.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to end the company’s monopoly without breaking up its search engine, and that is to turn its “index”—the mammoth and ever-growing database it maintains of internet content—into a kind of public commons.
There is precedent for this both in law and in Google’s business practices. When private ownership of essential resources and services—water, electricity, telecommunications, and so on—no longer serves the public interest, governments often step in to control them. One particular government intervention is especially relevant to the Big Tech dilemma: the 1956 consent decree in the U.S. in which AT&T agreed to share all its patents with other companies free of charge. As tech investor Roger McNamee and others have pointed out, that sharing reverberated around the world, leading to a significant increase in technological competition and innovation.
Doesn’t Google already share its index with everyone in the world? Yes, but only for single searches. I’m talking about requiring Google to share its entire index with outside entities—businesses, nonprofit organizations, even individuals—through what programmers call an application programming interface, or API.....MUCH MORE
Google already allows this kind of sharing with a chosen few, most notably a small but ingenious company called Startpage, which is based in the Netherlands. In 2009, Google granted Startpage access to its index in return for fees generated by ads placed near Startpage search results.
With access to Google’s index—the most extensive in the world, by far—Startpage gives you great search results, but with a difference. Google tracks your searches and also monitors you in other ways, so it gives you personalized results. Startpage doesn’t track you—it respects and guarantees your privacy—so it gives you generic results. Some people like customized results; others treasure their privacy. (You might have heard of another privacy-oriented alternative to Google.com called DuckDuckGo, which aggregates information obtained from 400 other non-Google sources, including its own modest crawler.)
If entities worldwide were given unlimited access to Google’s index, dozens of Startpage variants would turn up within months; within a year or two, thousands of new search platforms might emerge, each with different strengths and weaknesses....
And:
"Google to Donate Its Search Engine to the American Public" (GOOG)
