OPINION:
Google is having a rough week. The search giant’s stock plunged Monday as it was busted for using monopolistic schemes to maintain a dominant position in web searches and advertising. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an appointee of President Barack Obama, has yet to decide on the remedy.
Conservatives tend to resist running to Uncle Sam simply because a company is overwhelmingly popular with consumers. Among the concerns with doing so, the wheels of justice often turn so slowly that the concerns underlying an antitrust action can become obsolete before corrective measures can be applied.
In 1990, for instance, the Federal Trade Commission began investigating Microsoft for leveraging its dominant Windows operating system to juice the popularity of the company’s browser, Internet Explorer. By the time appeals had been exhausted, and the final settlement was approved in 2002, consumers were starting to move on to the next big thing.
The market would soon come to be dominated not by Microsoft, but by mobile. Today, Microsoft’s share of the browser market is 7.5%, having been supplanted by Google Chrome — proving the marketplace has a way of solving problems on its own over time.
But Google is certainly not endearing itself to anyone inclined to bristle against government intervention. The company has a long record of exploiting its monopoly position to exclude Republicans from the marketplace of ideas.
Last week, the top result when searching the phrase “Trump rally” was “Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta.” The company also did its best to hide results about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Google told House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, that the $2 trillion company made an honest mistake “caused by a bug.” It’s just a coincidence that all of Google’s “bugs” assist Democrats.
Mr. Trump isn’t buying it. In a recent interview with the online streaming personality Adin Ross, the former president said, “Look, there’s something wrong with Google. … Everyone should just go off Google and not use it.”
The Biden-Harris administration may also have had a hand in encouraging Big Tech’s censorship “bugs.” In a July 12 memo, Associate Deputy Attorney General George Turner wrote that FBI will “resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [foreign influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”’
Recall that “foreign influence” is the lie the intelligence community cooked up to coerce social media companies into suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop on the eve of the 2020 election. The scoundrels who have abused their position of public trust to affect an election shouldn’t be allowed to repeat their dirty trick a second time.
Executive branch involvement in censorship violates the First Amendment, and Big Tech, by going along with the ruse, is making a massive, unreported, in-kind contribution to the Democratic National Committee.
In his ruling, Judge Mehta said that Google went out of its way to destroy and conceal evidence, stating that “the court is taken aback by the lengths to which Google goes to avoid creating a paper trail for regulators and litigants.”
Thus, even those reluctant to board the trustbuster train can see there’s illicit — possibly evil — conduct taking place at Google. The company has only itself to blame if it finds itself without defenders.
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