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[CyberPanda]

Alphabet Inc.'s Google subsidiary is reportedly the target of an antitrust investigation by the US Justice Department, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The full report is behind a paywall, but the summary notes that Google will be scrutinized for its dominating search platform and other businesses.

Google has been under a bit of pressure in this area, particularly in the EU. The EU has leveraged several fines against Alphabet Inc., including a whopping 4.34 billion euros (4.86 billion dollars) penalty for blocking rival software on its dominant Android platform. The EU is also investigating Alphabet Inc. for practices pertaining to local search results and Google Adsense, both of which maintain dominant positions in their respective markets. The EU is reportedly also investigating Google's mapping technologies, among other things, potentially preparing further antitrust cases against the search giant.

In the late 90s, Microsoft was famously slapped by the US Department of Justice and the EUfor its own antitrust violations, which led to the "Choose your browser" pop-up in older operating systems, alongside a range of other rules Microsoft had to follow.

Microsoft fans should be no stranger to Google's generally anti-competitive behavior over the years, refusing to allow Microsoft to develop Google apps like YouTube for the Windows Phone operating system citing ridiculous reasons. There's also reason to think Google is arbitrarily blocking features in the Chromium version of Microsoft Edge, sporting an "Edge blacklist" that disables compatibility on seemingly on a whim.

While the back-and-forth with Microsoft has been relatively petty, if the US Department of Justice finds that Google has been unfairly leveraging its dominant positions in search and other businesses to stifle competition, it could lead to severe consequences for the tech giant.

The U.S. Justice Department is reportedly investigating Google for antitrust violations

This is so sad. Hey Cortana, play Despacito.

www.windowscentral.com

 

[Wings 嫩翼翻せ]

Well. This should be interesting to watch unravel.

The last time some government tried to embarrass Google, it failed miserably (I'm sure we all remember Congress). Hopefully things go a little better this time.

 

[CyberPanda]

Well. This should be interesting to watch unravel.

The last time some government tried to embarrass Google, it failed miserably (I'm sure we all remember Congress). Hopefully things go a little better this time.

Yep. I’m grabbing my .

 

[Dontero]

As much as theoretically good such things are fact is that big companies start to operate essentially like nations which means company will be eaten by corruption from inside and unlike nations they will not have independent body oversight (in this case public) this also causes them to not be innovative anymore and rest of their winnings.

Which means smaller companies can take them on and eventually conquer provided government won't create law to protect those big companies which they did A LOT. Good example for that is internet explorer and chrome rise.

Internet explorer was default browser as everyone knows. MS got big so was internet explorer and they stopped innovating in that field, first it was firefox that got like 40% of market and then chrome went on with its synchronization which completely killed IE.

Chrome got serious market share reaching now something like 80% and became corrupted. They started to decide for people what they can and can't install what sites they can and can't view and suddenly from 4-5ish browsers you got like 12-15 each proposing huge changes, they are still bit immature but few like Dissenter is something i will defo switch once will be up properly.

Another good example of that is Facebook replacing MySpace and Twitter/Istagram eating out Facebook slowly.
Myspace went from simple friends gathering hub into bizzaro blogish sphere, then came Facebook which only give people ability to talk with each other for free in post form. Then it started to corrupt and it added images, companies fake pages, ads between posts, games and their fucking non stop begging for likes and then people stopped talking with eath other and only posted pictures of where they have been or their kid, then Twitter came along and people realized that they don't care about some shitty kids but about people talking while Istagram took those photos because it was more focused on those people who take pictures to show around.

In other words those kind of laws only stop competition as they effectively delay corruption of big companies.