The Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate is stepping up efforts to reform antitrust laws to target anti-competitive behavior by major technology companies, with the goal of preventing other tech companies like Google from colluding against competitors.
The bill, called the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, was recently introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to crack down on big tech companies’ ” exclusionary practices” by big tech companies. The bill calls for resetting enforcement standards, shifting the burden of proof to companies in major cases, and requiring regulators to increase funding to study the impact of markets and mergers and acquisitions, as well as authorizing antitrust enforcement agencies to impose civil penalties, among other things.
“Exclusionary conduct” is defined as business activity that creates or maintains monopoly power through practices that disadvantage and harm competitors. Under U.S. law, the determination of whether a company has acted in an anticompetitive or monopolistic manner cannot be made solely by analyzing market share, but also by considering the conduct of its business activities.
Technology giants are often accused of engaging in exclusionary conduct. Oracle, for example, has accused Google of such conduct in a long-running legal battle that is currently before the Supreme Court.
Forbes reports that the Supreme Court is currently reviewing the case of Oracle v. Google, which involves how Google violated intellectual property laws by copying thousands of lines of application programming interfaces (APIs) from Oracle Java without permission to create its mobile device operating system, Android.
The lawsuit was quoted as saying, “Android now enjoys a duopoly on smartphones in the United States and controls 75 percent of the global market, while Google began paying billions of dollars to Apple to become the default search engine. Google also uses Android to power other verticals, such as YouTube, Gmail and Google Maps. in addition, Android brutally violates consumer privacy – greatly strengthening Google’s data monopoly. The rise of Android is critical for Google to consolidate its market power in search, advertising, data, browsing, email and other platforms. Google will not easily or profitably gain that advantage if it pays for a license to the API in the first place.”
U.S. media outlet Politico noted that Google and Facebook, the No. 1 and No. 2 players in the online advertising business, respectively, entered into a secret and illegal agreement in 2018 to split the market for ads on websites and apps, according to an antitrust lawsuit filed Wednesday (Feb. 10) against the search giants. The lawsuit, filed by Texas and eight other states, alleges that the two companies conspired to set prices and divide the mobile ad market between them.
A separate 36-page U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit was used to accuse Google of using $8 billion to $12 billion to gain monopoly power. It is alleged that this is a huge sum of money paid by Google to Apple, which was used to gain access to one of the most valuable assets in the online search world: the default state of the iPhone and all other Apple devices.
Investigators at the Justice Department say Google and Apple hammered out a multi-year agreement to make Google the default search engine on all iPhones and other Apple products. That means Apple’s Web browser Safari, voice assistant Siri and device lookup feature Spotlight will all make Google the default choice. The victory of getting the default search choice for Apple products is a historic win for Google.
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