SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
monopoly
Judge's Ruling on Google Search Monopoly Decried as 'Slap on the Wrist' for Tech Giant
"You don't find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot," said one critic.
Sep 03, 2025
A federal judge's Tuesday ruling on tech giant Google has drawn criticism from anti-monopoly advocates who say that it let the company walk away without having to give up its economic stranglehold over online searches and advertising.
As reported by The New York Times, Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google had to share some of its data with competing search platforms, while also placing restrictions on the company's ability to pay to ensure its search engine receives preferential treatment on web browsers and phones.
However, these remedies fell far short of measures requested by the US Department of Justice, which had asked that Google be forced to share more of its data with competitors and to sell off its Chrome web browser.
Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, offered a scathing assessment of Mehta's ruling, and she urged the government to appeal and push for harsher penalties against Google.
"You don't find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot," she said. "Similarly, you don't find Google liable for monopolization and then write a remedy that lets it protect its monopoly. This feckless remedy to the most storied case of monopolization of the past quarter century is a complete failure of his duty and must be appealed."
She went on to describe Mehta's decision as "bizarre" given that he had "found Google liable for maintaining one of the most consequential and damaging monopolies of the internet era."
Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, accused Mehta of letting Google get away with a "slap on the wrist" given the scale of the damage it has caused.
"Google for years has wielded its vast power over all layers of the digital economy to crush competitors, halt innovation, and rob Americans of their right to read, watch, and buy what they want without being manipulated by one of the most powerful corporations in human history," he said. "Judge Mehta's order that Google share search data with competitors and cease entering into exclusive contracts does nothing to right those wrongs."
Like Hegde, Lynn also urged the government to appeal the ruling.
Elise Phillips, policy counsel at the freedom of expression advocacy group Public Knowledge, took aim at Mehta for letting Google maintain control of both Chrome and the Android mobile operating system, even though he concluded that Google had abused its market power to stifle competition.
Phillips also suggested that elected officials needed to pick up the slack when it comes to holding giant corporations accountable for their actions.
"Judge Mehta's remedies decision signals why the courts cannot be the end-all, be-all of antitrust," she said. "Google's anticompetitive behavior, and behavior like it, can and must be confronted by legislation that targets conflicts of interest, self-preferencing, and discrimination online. The American people need sector-specific legislation that addresses these harms and breaks down barriers of entry into online markets, fostering competition, innovation, and choice."
Agnès Callamard, secretary general of human rights organization Amnesty International, also weighed in to express disappointment with Mehta's decision.
"This ruling was a missed chance to rein in Google's power," said Callamard. "Google's toxic business model is built on pervasive surveillance. By tracking people across the web and monetizing their personal data through targeted advertising, the company has severely undermined our right to privacy."
Google was first sued for antitrust violations by the DOJ in 2020 under the first Trump administration, and then again in 2023 under the Biden administration.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Google-California Deal Should Be a Wake-Up Call: Digital Monopolies Hurt Journalism
Google is the sole winner of this deal, and this should be an example of what not to do to redress power and financial imbalances between news media and large digital platforms.
Sep 05, 2024
A California-Google deal that would provide $250 million for local journalism and an “AI accelerator” program was announced by California Gov. Gavin Newsom as a “major breakthrough” to ensure the “survival” of newsrooms across the state. In exchange, the state has agreed to kill the California Journalism Protection Act, a bill that would have forced the tech giant to share revenues with news publishers and which was deemed to be more transparent than similar legislation in Australia and Canada.
News publishers and other advocates focusing on the good side of the deal (more money) have also been cautious about celebrating it. Journalists’ unions and associations have been more straightforward in decrying it. Altogether, newsrooms are feeling the toll of elongating their “survival” mode, especially if the trade-off is to continue handing their future to those who helped create their crisis.
By eliminating legislation enforcing revenue-share agreements, California has reduced Google’s financial liability compared with Australia and Canada, where news outlets, including broadcasters, are compensated for creating value for Google. In addition, Google got the state of California to pick up an important portion of the $250 million bill using public funding. More significantly, the deal allowed the corporation to avert disclosing how much value news generates for Google’s search engine, which estimates put at $21 billion a year in the U.S. based on searches using news media content.
Concentrated market power is hurting the chances for a free and financially independent press to thrive.
Let’s be clear: Google is the sole winner of this deal, and this should be an example of what not to do to redress power and financial imbalances between news media and large digital platforms. If anything, it should be a wake-up call to the harmful effects of digital monopolies on the news media industry. Governments can no longer spare Google and other tech giants from their role in the financial crisis of journalism.
The recent ruling from a federal district court confirming Google’s monopoly over search tells part of this story. Although that case didn’t address the corporation’s impact on newsrooms, we learned that Google’s grip on advertising demand couldn’t have been achieved without a key illegal practice: its multibillion-dollar contracts with phone makers that were designed to squash rival search engines. Today, search advertising continues to be the largest channel capturing ad spend in the U.S.
Most importantly, this stranglehold enabled Google to constrain media’s bargaining power and prevent any meaningful discussion about the dollar value news content provided to its search engine—as the looming threat of permanently turning off news access would have hurt the press even more. Without significant challengers to Google’s search engine, newsrooms are beholden to Google’s whims for news discoverability and distribution on search results.
A separate trial starting next week tackling Google’s monopoly over advertising technologies (ad-tech) is likely to complete the story of this corporation’s role in this crisis. The ad-tech industry, once thought to help news publishers make revenue from digital, has become extraordinarily complex, opaque, and concentrated. At the same time, it is the backbone that connects advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads across the web—providing an alternative to search and social media ads, all of which drives a marketplace worth around $300 billion in the United States alone.
Besides controlling search ad revenues, Google also controls the ad-tech platforms upon which most ad sales by news publishers are made. Without getting too technical, in practice this means Google has eyes on the value of news publishers’ ad inventory, on advertisers’ preferences and perceptions about those publishers, and on the algorithms that connect the two to determine ad prices.
Also unchallenged, Google controls between 50% and 90% of transactions in each layer of this market, where it takes a cut of about 35% of each ad dollar spent. In the trial, the Department of Justice is expected to cut through the ad-tech complexity and show how Google has also manipulated ad prices to divert ad dollars away from news publishers into the tech giant’s own pockets. For the first time in many years, in this case the DOJ is seeking a breakup to redress Google’s harms.
As a counterargument, Google has been trying to push a story in which a “very competitive” market already exists, since multiple giants in various other sectors—Amazon, Walmart, CVS, etc.—are also competing for ad dollars. This view invites us to presume news publishers and journalists must be doing something wrong, so what else is there to do but to help them to “survive” in this brave, new world?
But nothing could be further from the truth. Newsrooms across the world have not stopped innovating, changing their revenue models, and adapting to audiences’ new habits. Journalists continue to defend their trade and the rights that ensure they can do their jobs safely. People still want to find reliable news. But when it comes to competition, how do we even call it that when a handful of players control not only where news is discovered and accessed, but also drive appetite to monetize audiences’ personal data, and ultimately assign value to a publisher’s ad inventory?
The fight for legislation in California that would redress these imbalances was the first step—not the ultimate fix—to coming out of the “survival” mentality that has been entrenched for far too long in journalism. Concentrated market power is hurting the chances for a free and financially independent press to thrive. As long as short-term fixes like the California-Google deal, obscure this reality, we will continue to allow the very same people we should be holding accountable to shape the future of democracy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Ratepayers Launch a National Escalation for Utility Justice
From the Sun Belt to New England, over two dozen coordinated actions were held in 17 states to fight back against monopoly utility companies’ rate hikes and greenwashing.
Aug 20, 2024
Across the country, families rely on utility companies to provide the power we need to heat and cool our homes, cook, bathe, and charge the devices we rely on. But instead of focusing on delivering clean, affordable, reliable power to ratepayers, for-profit utility companies are hiking rates on working families while doubling down on fossil fuels. As temperatures rise and utility bills soar, working families have had enough.
This month, ratepayers launched a nationwide escalation for utility justice. From the Sun Belt to New England, over two dozen coordinated actions were held in 17 states to fight back against utility rate hikes and greenwashing. This is a powerful beginning to a locally led, national movement to demand clean, renewable energy from for-profit utility companies, and stop rate hikes for dirty power.
In New Hampshire, climate activists are opposing a 16% rate hike that has been proposed by Eversource, which serves over 70% of the state. The increase is currently under review by the public utilities commission (PUC). The governor-appointed public utilities commission approved the rate hike, as they have with every cost increase that the utility companies have proposed in the last three years. After grassroots organizers stopped Liberty Utilities, another New Hampshire utility company, from building the Granite Bridge fracked gas pipeline in 2020, Liberty attempted to recoup more than $7 million they spent toward the proposal by raising electricity rates. The public utilities commission denied Liberty’s outrageous request, but this is not the first time a utility company has tried to put their expensive failed fossil fuel projects in ratepayers’ utility bills.
There is a long precedent of publicly-owned, democratically-controlled utility companies in the United States and around the world, and no reason why we should assume dirty, corporate-controlled utility companies relying on energy sources of the 1900s have to be our future.
The fights happening in New Hampshire with utility companies are familiar across the country. From Buffalo, New York to the Bay Area of California, ratepayers are protesting and organizing to hold for-profit utility corporations accountable for squeezing ratepayers to pad their pockets while burning the planet.
In Nevada, working families, ratepayers, and climate activists are fighting to stop NV Energy from nearly tripling its monthly fixed service charge on electric bills from $16.50 to $44.40 while lowering the volumetric charge. This regressive policy means ratepayers who use less energy will be charged more, while heavy energy users, like wealthy corporations, will be charged less—it’s wrong. Nevada is one of the fastest-heating states in the nation, and relies on electricity to keep communities comfortable. With NV Energy’s monopoly power and rising temperatures, Nevadans feel like the odds are stacked against them.
Like many for-profit utility companies, NV Energy is raising rates and burning the planet, instead of capitalizing on the plentiful solar capacity of the Sun Belt state it serves. Nevadans are pushing the Public Utilities Commission to stand up for clean, affordable, reliable energy. With an unprecedented $369 billion in federal investments unlocked in the two-year-old Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to support the transition to clean energy, utility corporations have no excuse, besides greed, to keep charging ratepayers for dirty, expensive, unreliable power.
While companies have raised electricity prices nearly 31% since 2021, and over of a quarter of Americans struggle to pay their utility bills, activists are fighting to stop rate hikes, stop expansions of dirty power, and pressure lawmakers to stop taking political contributions from the utility corporations they are responsible for regulating.
Local communities are right to hold utility corporations accountable for raising costs on families and stalling action on clean energy. But the underlying structure of monopoly utility companies is not sustainable. When given a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transition to a sustainable energy future through the IRA, they opt to expand gas lines and invest in dirty power. Utility Corporations are failing to reimagine how growing electricity needs could be met with wind, solar, geothermal, energy efficiency, and energy conservation efforts.They have no incentive to lower costs for families, and every incentive to use their massive lobbying power to influence policy and raise rates.
Despite the money we pay each month, for-profit utility companies are not accountable to us, and their monopoly power leaves us with no alternatives. The system is rigged, but it does not have to be this way.
Together, we can change the rules. There is a long precedent of publicly-owned, democratically-controlled utility companies in the United States and around the world, and no reason why we should assume dirty, corporate-controlled utility companies relying on energy sources of the 1900s have to be our future. Now is the time to demand utility justice, to ensure clean, affordable, and reliable energy for all in a way that puts people and the planet first.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular