Just one month before the Presidential election, antitrust is in the air. The House Judiciary Committee released its report on antitrust enforcement Tuesday, and Attorney General Bill Barr is reportedly pushing to bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as possible.
Conservatives have not traditionally been the party of antitrust; there is a common intuition among Republicans that the free market will resolve any of the abuses of individual companies, and that enforcement would stifle competition and innovation.
But when it comes to Google, the winds of change are here. While Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Apple have all been subject to conservative critique at times, no company is more in the crosshairs than the search giant—and no company has done more to invite conservative scrutiny.
Conservatives should indeed seek antitrust enforcement against Google. Google’s brazen censorship is as much a product of its monopoly power as its anti-conservative bias. Ending Google’s antitrust amnesty—and enforcing the laws on the books—is both legally sound, and an important component of any project to remove the sword of Damocles hanging over conservatives online.
ANTI-CONSERVATIVE BIAS + MONOPOLY POWER = TROUBLE
A Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Google is not the impartial platform it purports to be. Google, according to the WSJ, made algorithmic changes to favor bigger businesses over small ones, made behind-the-scenes adjustments to features like “auto-complete,” and maintained blacklists of websites.
Beyond the WSJ’s reporting, there is plenty of evidence of Google’s mistreatment of conservatives. Social media users flagged last year how Google mysteriously removed any hint of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal from their autocomplete results, while other major search engines featured the suggested search prominently. There was also the instance of The Federalist being temporarily demonetized based on misrepresentations made by an NBC journalist, and a ton of reporting from Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari about the reaction of the company to President Trump’s election in 2016. (Surprise: they weren’t happy about it)…
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