Like some 1890s redux, are we as a society feeling uppity against monopolies — Big Railroads replaced by Big Tech — are we about to bring out the pitchforks and demand the break-up of the “trusts”?
Not quite so fast, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
Google has to hand over its search results and some other data to some tech rivals, but does not need to break itself up by selling its widely used Chrome web browser.
The ruling gave its stock a healthy boost this week and made possible many Tech Bro fist-bumps in the halls of not just Google but every other Silicon Valley internet headquarters.
Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did not end up ordering the kinds of huge changes to the ways they do business pushed for by the federal government in a new bid to constrain Silicon Valley.
Mehta told Google it must share some of its search data with “qualified competitors” as a governor on its monopoly. But the Justice Department had wanted the company to divulge even more data, saying it’s how Google maintains dominance.
Really — when’s the last time you used Bing rather than use everyone’s favorite default search engine? Oh, you did on Wednesday, did you? So you’re the one.
Seriously, Google is quite clearly and unarguably a monopoly throughout most of the Western world, and the Eastern one, too, when it isn’t blocked by authoritarian regimes. Monopolies — many achieved through the brilliance of their product — also create economic problems for consumers and societies. But free-thinking people and believers in limited government interference in commerce have to applaud the restraint of the judge’s ruling and be glad that there were no alarmist judicial orders to break up the behemoth.
Most of us get good value from Google and Chrome and are glad they are there.
Are we thrilled with other aspects of the way that Google does its dirty work?
Clearly, we as newspapers whose journalists provide the hot stories that the search engine hoovers up and regurgitates as if it had created them are not at all thrilled by that.
It’s why we editorialized on this page in March: “Open AI and Google, having long trained their ravenous bots on the work of newsrooms like this one, now want to throw out long-established copyright law by arguing, we kid you not, that the only way for the United States to defeat the Chinese Communist Party is for those tech giants to steal the content created with the sweat equity of America’s human journalists.”
Google’s already a daily component of most Americans’ lives. If it wants to stay on our good side, it might temper its tendencies to rule all the world rather than just a big part of it.