Us vs google monopolistic gatekeeping of the internet hurts startups and democracy alike

Us vs google monopolistic gatekeeping of the internet hurts startups and democracy alike

The US Department of Justice filing an antitrust case against Google feels like a long time coming. Over 92% of the worldwide search traffic is captured by Google. The lock it has on search and search advertising industries, on the very flow of information, is almost unassailably fortified by the company’s own operating system, apps and app distribution. This enables it to grow dominance in various business verticals while starving rivals of oxygen. The suit thus has “monumental” implications and it has received bipartisan support. As attorney-general William Barr suggested, America and the world may never get to benefit from the “next Google” if we let Google continue its anticompetitive ways.

The lawsuit has put a spotlight on the anticompetitive behaviour of Big Tech at large, especially as it was closely preceded by the House antitrust subcommittee reporting that today Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook all enjoy the kinds of monopolies last seen in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons. Microsoft included, and helped along by Covid, these five have a combined market valuation exceeding the economies of all countries but the US and China. This is on top of different countries’ worries that the US government would be hostile to their regulation of US tech companies.

But if the script of regulation is written in the US itself, it will encourage pushback in other jurisdictions. It may not be easy to wrap one’s head around the great concentration of the world’s wealth and power in a handful of companies – with all its economic, political and social implications downstream. In the newspaper industry the tech giants that hoover up the ad revenues don’t generate content themselves. They profit from the resulting decline of facts and the rational ecosystem itself. But what about the rest of us? Populist tides rising and democratic vitality fading mean a real decline in the quality of life.

And to underline, the monopoly gatekeeper will constantly deny fairplay to the “scrappy, underdog” startup that it once was. It is true that Big Tech has also enabled countless advances in modern society. But a rebalancing is needed precisely so that new innovations and enterprises are not stifled at birth. For Indian startups Google’s dominance is stark through the entire tech stack down to its Play Store. So beyond what happens in the US, Indian regulators must also act on curbing monopoly and fostering competition.