Story
Google's business model is the issue,' says David Cicilline
During the tech antitrust hearing on Wednesday, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) tore Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the dominance of the company in the search and use of data to monitor potential competitors.
It's Google's business model that's the problem, Cicilline said, citing a pattern of anti-competitive behavior that allowed Google to grow while smaller businesses were crushed. Our documents show that Google has evolved from a turntable to the rest of the web to a walled garden that increasingly keeps users on its sites.
Cicilline cited detailed emails from "over 10 years ago" between Google employees talking about rising websites and traffic. Employees began to fear competition from certain websites[and] web pages that could divert search traffic and revenue from Google, Cicilline said.
For years , companies like Yelp have accused Google of stealing their search content, diverting clicks from their own websites and from Google+. According to Cicilline, the Committee's investigation shows that when Yelp raised these concerns with the company, Google threatened to delete the website unless it was allowed to browse its contents.
Documents from the Hearing on “Online Platforms and Market Power: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google" pic.twitter.com/O50aFmg2kd
— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) July 29, 2020
Isn't that anti-competitive? Cicilline inquired about Pichai.
Pichai did not completely discuss competitiveness issues, he said, "While I run the company, I'm just focused on giving customers what they want. We perform ourselves to the highest expectations.
Google is currently pursuing a variety of systematic antitrust inquiries by law enforcement officials. All the Justice Department and the State Attorneys General group are involved in tech giant investigations, and California opened its own antitrust investigation into the firm earlier this month.
Specifically, Cicilline quoted interviews with small companies and emails between Google staff showing that the firm uses data from online traffic analysis to detect possible rivals and that it improves its own websites and search goods.
These documents reveal that Google employees addressed the 'proliferating danger' that these web pages present to Google. Any traffic diverted to other pages was a lack of sales, Cicilline said.
On Tuesday, Markup published a study stating that Google gives preference to its own goods and services in a large portion of the links on the first page of the search results.
The latter half of Cicilline 's questionnaire deepened Google's monitoring capability over web traffic to detect up-and-coming rivals. Cicilline replied, "Has Google ever used its web traffic monitoring to detect competitive threats? Pichai did not explicitly refute the accusation.
Congressman, much like most companies, we 're seeking to grasp patterns from, you know, evidence that we can use, and we're using it to develop our offerings for consumers.
