DOJ Suit To Break Up Google Was Years in the Making for Antitrust Chief (wsj.com) 43
An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kanter has been one of Google's main legal foes for nearly 15 years. Last week, as the nation's top antitrust cop, he delivered a threat to break up the internet company. Mr. Kanter, the Justice Department's assistant attorney general for antitrust, filed a lawsuit alleging that Google is an illegal monopolist in the market for brokering ads on the internet. Some of the complaints trace back to early 2000s, when Mr. Kanter started questioning Google's role in the digital economy on behalf of his then-legal clients, including Microsoft.
The 140-page lawsuit, which Google, a unit of Alphabet, has said includes untrue allegations and misstatements about its business, embraces charges the government once wrote off as far-fetched. In 2008, the Federal Trade Commission, which also polices threats to competition, said Google wouldn't be able to smother rivals in the digital-advertising world and declined to block its purchase of DoubleClick, an ad broker that the Justice Department now says Google should be forced to sell. The DOJ's lawsuit alleges that threats the FTC dismissed actually came to pass. The company built a moat around its business matching web publishers' supply of ad space with advertisers' demand, according to the DOJ's lawsuit. When new companies tried to compete or customers sought better deals, Google responded by blocking rivals from its platform or buying them outright and forcing them to work only with its products, the lawsuit alleges.
Mr. Kanter, 49 years old, is one of the leaders of a movement that sees big technology companies including Google, Amazon.com, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Apple as monopolists in the tradition of the 19th-century railroad and oil companies that inspired the original antitrust laws. "Today there is nobody in the world who knows more about that business and the antitrust issues surrounding it than Jonathan," said Charles "Rick" Rule, who worked with Mr. Kanter in private practice. "He has been confronting Google for 15 years." Mr. Kanter has spent most of his legal career in private practice, sometimes defending corporate clients from government investigations, but also representing companies in pressing law enforcers to go after rivals that have grown dominant. He began looking into Google during the 2000s decade on behalf of Microsoft, which the DOJ in 1998 alleged was an illegal monopolist in the personal-computer market in a lawsuit settled in 2001.
The 140-page lawsuit, which Google, a unit of Alphabet, has said includes untrue allegations and misstatements about its business, embraces charges the government once wrote off as far-fetched. In 2008, the Federal Trade Commission, which also polices threats to competition, said Google wouldn't be able to smother rivals in the digital-advertising world and declined to block its purchase of DoubleClick, an ad broker that the Justice Department now says Google should be forced to sell. The DOJ's lawsuit alleges that threats the FTC dismissed actually came to pass. The company built a moat around its business matching web publishers' supply of ad space with advertisers' demand, according to the DOJ's lawsuit. When new companies tried to compete or customers sought better deals, Google responded by blocking rivals from its platform or buying them outright and forcing them to work only with its products, the lawsuit alleges.
Mr. Kanter, 49 years old, is one of the leaders of a movement that sees big technology companies including Google, Amazon.com, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Apple as monopolists in the tradition of the 19th-century railroad and oil companies that inspired the original antitrust laws. "Today there is nobody in the world who knows more about that business and the antitrust issues surrounding it than Jonathan," said Charles "Rick" Rule, who worked with Mr. Kanter in private practice. "He has been confronting Google for 15 years." Mr. Kanter has spent most of his legal career in private practice, sometimes defending corporate clients from government investigations, but also representing companies in pressing law enforcers to go after rivals that have grown dominant. He began looking into Google during the 2000s decade on behalf of Microsoft, which the DOJ in 1998 alleged was an illegal monopolist in the personal-computer market in a lawsuit settled in 2001.
I won't hold my breath (Score:5, Funny)
It is encouraging to see the government move on this but I won't hold my breath. We didn't break up Microsoft in the 90s and they were most certainly abusing their monopoly position. Maybe things will be different this time around. We can only hope.
Re:I won't hold my breath (Score:5, Insightful)
It is encouraging to see the government move on this but I won't hold my breath. We didn't break up Microsoft in the 90s and they were most certainly abusing their monopoly position. Maybe things will be different this time around. We can only hope.
The lawyer in question worked for MS and the origin of the suit was when he worked for MS.
Some of the complaints trace back to early 2000s, when Mr. Kanter started questioning Google's role in the digital economy on behalf of his then-legal clients, including Microsoft.
This lawyer may know everything about anti-trust law but he is so morally compromised that I don't trust him to do really anything. Even if he breaks up a company, I have my doubts this would be to anyone's benefit. If he couldn't see the absolutely absurd amount of damage the MS monopoly did and thought it was a good idea to work for them, then why would I trust him to know what companies are monopolies. Seems like his opinion is easily bought.
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Yeah, as much as Google may need reigning in/breaking up... a competitor's lawyer (especially from Microsoft) getting a government job to continue to do the same work is not really that much different that Ajit Pai's stint at the FCC.
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Ok, I can see Google, Amazon...and Facebook (Meta) as monopolies....
But Apple?
How?
Apple makes phones....so do many other companies.
Apple makes computers....so do many other companies.
Apple makes tablets....so do many other companies.
Everything they do has a number of competitors out there...they're not even the largest manufacture of any of their lines of products vs competitors in the world, at least as far as I know.
So, I'm curious....how
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Apple has a monopoly on installing apps on iOS devices. No one else, even the owner of the device, is allowed to do it. This gives Apple sole discretion over which apps are allowed on the device, and costs developers by requiring them to pay Apple a yearly fee to even submit apps for approval for the store.
Apple uses that monopoly to take a large cut of money spent in those apps, at least for "digital goods". Apple prevents companies from doing their own payment processing so they can continue to collect
dumbass (Score:1)
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Could you even name three coworkers you had at the job you worked 20+ years ago?
Yes, yes I can. And since he probably never would have started this anti-Google career without MS, I think it is something worth considering. He started his quest to break up Google before Google acquired anybody or had dominance in search (or even before search was such a money maker). It was tactic employed by MS to waste a smaller competitor's resources on a non-sense lawsuit. This person has since continued on this same task for his entire career. So perhaps putting him in the DOJ on anti-trust mat
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This is not about an individual lawyer, this is about the entire DoJ
It is a large organization with decades of experience running anti-trust cases against mega corporations, they do not NEED any single hot shot lawyer
The fact that they are willing to employ a lawyer with such an obvious axe to grind shows two things
1. hey lack the resources needed to do their job properly
2. They lack an ethical basis to demand law abiding citizens and corporations to trust them
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Mr. Kanter, 49 years old, is one of the leaders of a movement that sees big technology companies including Google, Amazon.com, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Apple as monopolists in the tradition of the 19th-century railroad and oil companies that inspired the original antitrust laws.
And yet, one name is conspicuously absent from that list.
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Seems like he's angling to get hired by Google. "It's in your best interest", he says.
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This lawyer may know everything about anti-trust law but he is so morally compromised that I don't trust him
Unfortunately, you're taking his bio from the Wall Street Journal, and trusting them for reporting on a legal adversary of a major corporation. That's... weak information hygiene.
Re:I won't hold my breath [for self-breakup] (Score:2)
Nice FP, but rather a weak joke for Funny moderation. Then again there seems to be a dearth of Funny these days...
Just reiterating my own favored solution approach. I think the giant companies should be strongly encouraged to break themselves up. The government (if it were a good government, and I ain't holding my breath for that, either) would create rules of the game so that the path to higher retained earnings led to MORE competition and MORE choice, and, I dare say, MORE freedom.
My idea would be a progr
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Google is far from perfect, but they take protection of the data they collect extremely seriously. Would all 12 Baby Googles do that? Would each Baby Google end up ultimately with more or less the same data anyway because most websites would cycle between their ads? Does having 12 companies with that data help us in any way?
Since the GDPR, website tracking has tanked. It used to be way more creepy.
Google is able to maintain their creepy ways because they read all your e-mail, collect data from phones, follow you on YouTube, etc. One of the ways they're trying to get around GDPR is to have ad customers manually upload lead and client lists to help "optimize" the experience.
Microsoft is the same way. Between 365, LinkedIn, gaming services, Windows, GitHub, etc. they have tons of data on everyone.
The GDPR has been great, but the
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Other (Score:4, Interesting)
We need to make a list of all of the creepy stalking and service-hindering things that they do in the name of advertising and make that fineable.
At this point, I do not know why they do not require that Ad companies are a completely separate entity as they are immediately at odds with the user getting content that they want.
Re:Other (Score:4, Informative)
At this point, I do not know why they do not require that Ad companies are a completely separate entity as they are immediately at odds with the user getting content that they want.
While Google has a number of different services, many of them are loss leaders for their "real" business - advertising. YouTube and Google Search are expensive to operate and have little in the way of income potential - people won't pay to use a search engine, and I'm betting YouTube Premium subscriptions are a drop in the bucket compared to what they charge for advertising space before each video.
If they're forced to sell their Advertising business they'd probably be able to transition their paid services without problem, but the "free" ones used by the public to prop up their Advertising division would cost them a fortune and likely be disbanded or heavily modified. YouTube would probably switch to making content creators pay to use their services, similar to how Apple currently charges a premium to sell Apps and Entertainment products on their App Store, limiting the creation of new channels and likely forcing smaller creators off the platform.
Who knows what would happen to search.
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If they're forced to sell their Advertising business they'd probably be able to transition their paid services without problem, but the "free" ones used by the public to prop up their Advertising division would cost them a fortune and likely be disbanded ..
Nonsense. Being forced to sell off their Ad-brokering services (where they connect Publishers other than themselves to advertisers to meet demands) would NOT automatically imply they can no longer show ads in connection with their free services, Youtu
Break off Chromium and Android (Score:4, Interesting)
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I've almost been downmodded enough by the cowardly editors/owners to lose my karma bonus, so don't worry, you won't see my comments much longer.
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You know there are countries that balance the freedoms of corporations versus the government attempting to mandate towards the common good.
Like Denmark's socialist democracy.
Any one entity with too much power pretty quickly = bad, and both corporations and government can fall into that category.
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I'm not a huge fan of anti-trust legislation in general since the laws are not objective enough IMO and seem to put arbitrary power into the hands of regulators, letting them target who they don't like without having clearly (enough, for me anyway) defined criteria for law-abiding vs infringing.
But politics aside, if I were going to break up Google I'd want to see YouTube, Chrome, Android, G-Suite and Search all become separate companies not owned by Alphabet.
Something tells me the quality of each would exp
Re:Break off Chromium and Android (Score:4, Insightful)
Also the technologies around video playback should finally be stripped of their patents so we don't rely on centralized sites like Youtube.
We don't rely on centralized sites like Youtube because of patents. We rely on them because it's astronomically expensive to run one. The compute, bandwidth, and storage costs for a video site like Youtube are orders of magnitude larger than just about any other kind of online business.
It's also because it's seemingly impossible to convince users to use other sites once one becomes popular. As an example: Youtube, Microsoft (via Mixer), and Facebook (via Facebook Gaming) have all tried and failed to pull significant users from Amazon's Twitch for game live streaming despite throwing massive amounts of cash at their efforts. Microsoft completely gave up, Facebook just cut most of their paid partners they bought away from Twitch several years ago, and while Youtube is still trying, it's not working for them. Other smaller companies have also tried to break into the market with little to no success.
Youtube for user created videos, Twitch for live streams, and Netflix for entertainment. People bitch about monopolies, but they encourage their creation with their "I don't want another account/app!" attitude.
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When there are 20 streaming platforms, the majority with one show they have exclusively, but one keeps having the one people talk about ,then it becomes the monopoly ...
When there are 20 video platforms but one is where everyone posts ...
When there are 20 social media sites but all your friends are on one ...
they are rarely the best ... they just got lucky with which one people stayed with long enough so that the inertia to move was too great
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to.. (Score:1)
Bill Gates said his Microsoft experience taught him its best to work out a mutual antitrust agreement as early as possible rather than let the tension drag on, because such introduces too much uncertainty into planning. Let's see if Google learns from history.
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It's not clear how Microsoft could have worked out an agreement sooner with a government which was busy with an investigation into all the ways in which they had violated their market position. And it's also not clear that it would have been a good idea, because they got away with little more than a handslap thanks to Bush and his AG Ashcroft.
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> And it's also not clear that it would have been a good idea, because they got away with little more than a handslap thanks to Bush and his AG Ashcroft.
Maybe it would've been better for MS if the handslap came earlier. And since there's a new Prez election every 4 years, any planning based on current Prez's position is only valid for 4 years. What if MS planned based on a monopoly-friendly Prez, but the next Prez has a different view?
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What if MS planned based on a monopoly-friendly Prez, but the next Prez has a different view?
Well, that's what I'm saying. By waiting, he got a more monopoly-friendly administration. What actually happened literally directly contradicts what BillyG said there, which I think raises the point, why are you willing to believe anything that proven liar and crook says?
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Not like he would be going on the record saying he bribed his way out of that one.
Peak google (Score:2)
Same old game. (Score:2)
Most people don't know how bad it is. (Score:1)
Derpy (Score:2)
The 140-page lawsuit, which Google, a unit of Alphabet, has said includes untrue allegations ...
100% of the allegations that google fails to claim are untrue will be found to be factually true in a Partial Summary Judgement before the trial. So yeah... they better say that!
Google is the problem? (Score:1)
Kanter -49 years old -- this matters why? (Score:1)
My prediction... (Score:2)
As with Microsoft, this will drag out and by the time its coming to a conclusion, technology will have moved on, the paradigm will have shifted and Google will be just another player in a market that didn't exist at the time the legal action commenced and the whole premise of the legal action will have become outdated.
Remember all those anti google journalists? (Score:2)
Now we know where they came from.