Government action on big tech monopoly power moving quickly

Initial reaction from the tech sector to the DOJ move against Google was mixed.

“Big tech has made billions However, big tech companies use technologies such as machine learning to exploit human psychology in ways that keep users addicted to their platforms, Gualtieri said.

“It would be nearly impossible for a competitor to emerge because they don’t have the data to have effective ML models, or big tech will buy them out before they get too big,” he added.

Tech industry groups and some analysts called the lawsuit from the Trump administration politically motivated, coming just before the U.S. election.

Michael Fauscette, chief research officer at technology research firm G2, said it’s troubling that Google engages in practices such as favoring its own products and services in search results, but the onus should be more on government regulators to improve oversight than on the tech vendors to police themselves.

“It’s really complicated, and I think it’s hard to make general statements that come out of this, like ‘they’re definitely anticompetitive and should be broken up,'” Fauscette said. “We got here because we haven’t been enforcing laws on mergers and acquisitions for years.”

Some saw the suit — the biggest tech antitrust action since the government sued Microsoft two decades ago — was long in coming and in line with a series of antitrust suits, fines and regulatory moves against Google “It’s merited. These are fair questions. Are they using their platform to shut out or shut down competition?” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and analyst at Deep Analysis.

Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, Kent Walker, responded to the DOJ lawsuit on the company’s blog:

“Today’s lawsuit by the Department of Justice is deeply flawed. People use Google because they choose to, not because they’re forced to, or because they can’t find alternatives,” the blog post said. “This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers. To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use.”