The DOJ suit and its timing
Bob Zadek opened the episode by noting that the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. had just filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, and posed the question of whether a listener should root for the DOJ or for Google. He described the case as affecting free speech rights and antitrust and anti-competitive business practices, and said the question of whom to root for does not depend on party. He introduced his guest Ryan Young as a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who spends his time on regulatory reform, trade regulation and antitrust regulation, and as the author of an article titled “Google Antitrust Lawsuit: Heavy on Politics, Weak on Legal Merits.” Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
Young said the complaint had two facets. The first was Google’s very large market share in its search engine, which he put at 85% to 90% depending on whose numbers are used, against competitors Bing and DuckDuckGo and a rumored Apple search engine that did not yet exist. He noted that one complaint among conservatives is that Google uses that share to bias search results against conservatives and to censor conservative ideas. The second facet was advertising: Young said Google and Facebook together have more than a two-thirds share of all online advertising, and that the Justice Department argues that is too much power for one company and too lucrative a revenue source. Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
On remedy, Young said the department never specified in the complaint what a victory would look like, calling that one of the biggest problems with the case. He said career staff in the Justice Department had been building the case for a year or longer and were unhappy that the complaint came out so soon, that the timing was politicized, and that Attorney General Bill Barr wanted it out before the election and got it. Young said some career staff left the case and refused to sign on in protest over how shoddy they believed it was, and that having looked over the case he thought they were right. He described proposals to break Google into different firms, with one side handling search and another handling Google Maps, or to split it into two competing search engines, and said the complaint does not specify which. Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
Power, consumers and the dozen keystrokes
Zadek counted that Young had used the word “power” six times and asked where in any founding document the mission is for government to attack power simply because it exists. He said he could understand attacking power where one entity is harming another, but that power per se is benign unless misused, and that power cannot be allocated evenly among all players in the marketplace. He compared Google to the Wall Street Journal, which he said has lots of power by dint of having a good product, and to Amazon, which he set aside as perhaps another show. Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
Young answered that Google does not have very much power at all. He said one part of the case is that Google pays Apple and smartphone companies to make its browser the default, and that it is believed to pay Apple $8 to $12 billion every year to make Google search the default on iPhones. He drew the comparison to the last big tech antitrust case, the Microsoft case over Internet Explorer, which he said Microsoft tied into Windows and made the default and made impossible to uninstall. Even though Microsoft then had a dominating share of the browser market, Young said, within a couple of years Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari took over, and Microsoft Internet Explorer and its successor Microsoft Edge have a combined market share of maybe 15%. His conclusion was that Microsoft never actually had power and consumers did, and that the reason Google is on top is that people prefer to use it. He called the alternative the “dozen keystrokes” argument: typing bing.com into a browser, even Google’s Chrome, still takes the user there. Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
Zadek suggested listeners comparison shop search engines, running the identical search on two or three and making a buying decision even though the product is free, and said one of the non-Google engines might give more accurate information and less noise. He argued that if Google is cooking the search books, users will leave and the marketplace will punish it, because Google has no monopoly on the data. Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
Advertising prices and the monopoly definition
Young returned to the definition of monopoly discussed earlier in the show: the ability to raise prices, squeeze supply and get away with it. He said that even as Facebook and Google combined to capture over two-thirds of online advertising between themselves, advertising prices have been cut in half in the last decade, while print advertising prices have gone up and some newspapers charge double what they used to. If the two companies had the concentrated monopoly power that should be fought, he said, they would not be cutting prices in half or spending billions on research and development to improve their algorithms and advertising services. He called this the opposite of monopoly and a vibrant competitive process, and said the case is weak on both the search and advertising fronts. Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
Zadek argued that splitting Google up would have no beneficial effect on consumers and probably some detriment, and asked how size would even be measured — profits, assets, employees, real estate owned. He said the only ones hurt by Google’s power are the government, which likes to be the most powerful enterprise around, and that if anybody is exercising monopoly power it is those at the DOJ using their monopoly power to get rid of competition for the attention of Americans. Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
Twitter, private moderation and the misuse of antitrust
Zadek turned to the parallel antitrust conversation around Twitter, recalling that the New York Post released a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and that Twitter blocked it, invoking a policy about hacked material, and later apologized. He said Jack Dorsey and others were dragged before Congress, that Ted Cruz publicly scolded Dorsey and complained about his power, and that Cruz asked, “Who elected you, Mr. Dorsey?” — to which, Zadek said, Dorsey did not have a good answer because the answer is nobody. Zadek called the application of antitrust to Twitter a gross misuse of the word and the concept. Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
Young said he found it almost unbelievable how short-sighted Republicans were being: granting that tech companies may have in-house bias and may mute conservative thought, he said Republicans were proposing to gear up a large antitrust and speech regulation machine and hand the keys to Democrats, who would use the power against them. Zadek compared this to Harry Reid’s short-term approach as Senate majority leader in compromising norms around the 60-vote supermajority for federal judges, which he said came back to haunt him and produced Amy Coney Barrett and perhaps Kavanaugh. Young agreed and called it a thoroughly bipartisan failing, stating as a cardinal rule of politics that one should never give oneself powers one would not want the other side to have. Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020)
Across episodes
The excerpts come from a single episode, and the show’s treatment of Google appears only there; the sources show no development between an earlier and a later discussion.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of Department of Justice v. Google, the court that heard it, or the statutes and amendments the complaint turned on. They do not give the name of any bill, the date the suit was filed, or the terms of any remedy actually imposed. They also break off mid-sentence in several places, including Zadek’s introduction of the “keystroke” segment and the close of the Twitter discussion, so nothing after those points is reported here.