Other Papers Say: Google’s monopoly must end

The following editorial originally appeared in the New York Daily News:

Last week began a federal antitrust trial against Google for alleged monopolistic practices when it comes to the online advertising space, with the Justice Department contending that the company has outsize dominion over what is a lifeline for industries including online publishing.

Google is deploying the arguments that monopolists always do in these scenarios: that its dominance makes things more seamless, integrated and navigable to publishers and ad sellers. That is not really the point; an illegal monopoly can be rather frictionless, but it’s still a monopoly. The problem is that it’s allowed to set prices and features and has no incentive to improve its services.

The government’s case will include a number of publishers laying out how they’re all but forced to use Google’s ad services technologies, which dominate every part of the process, from the mechanisms to list ad space for sale to the methods of buying, placing and displaying that ad space.

That Google is a monopolist had already been legally established last month, when another federal judge ruled against the company in a separate lawsuit contending that its eponymous search engine was itself a monopoly. The penalties for that ruling have yet to be determined, but for both these cases the consequence could eventually be a breaking up of the giant. We hope for another victory for the free market here, part of a drumbeat that can finally rectify the very lopsided landscape in digital services.

The behemoth — once a search company that has since branched out to touch almost every aspect of online commerce, business infrastructure and services — cannot hold itself as unfairly or uniquely targeted. In recent years, Uncle Sam has gone after the range of tech giants, from Apple to Meta to Amazon, often under similar arguments. These companies grew out of an earlier Wild West of internet culture, where they saw themselves as frenzied upstarts trying to make it big in this new landscape.

Those times are long past, but these companies have kept that same attitude of scrappy startup that have to fight their way to the top even as they’ve become some of the world’s most valuable and powerful corporations. How many other innovations and advancements could be accomplished if newcomers had any chance of competing with individual parts of Google’s business without being either crushed or absorbed?

These corrective steps are actually the surest way to preserve that culture of improvement and competition that Google and its contemporaries claim to hold dear. If and when they aren’t able to call the shots on whole sections of contemporary online life and commercial activity, new players will have the opportunity to step in and do things differently in ways that will help customers and consumers.