The DOJ May Break Up Google and Monopolies Might Be Illegal Again

Folks, I have some wonderful news to report from a better future all the way in…uh…1890: there’s antitrust laws! Wait a second, I’m hearing that this event didn’t take place 134 years ago, but recently? Really? We do this now?

Per Bloomberg:

A bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

The move would be Washington’s first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

Want to feel old? There are millions of voting-age adults who were born in a world that both never saw 9/11 (just its consequences) and also never knew that the United States has a policy to break up monopolies.

If you could quickly summarize the left’s opposition to the Clinton-Obama neoliberal generation bookending a world-historic disaster, it would be in the monopolistic and oligopolistic world we’re all trapped in. Neoliberalism by definition shifts power from the government to the market, and the bipartisan policy stretching from The End of History to Bidenomics was to do that as much as possible (ie: Obamacare being the Heritage Foundation’s policy). The GOP obviously took it to more depraved degrees, but economic policies over the last half-century were all broadly pointed in the same direction: concentrating power in the market. Welcome to the world that neoliberalism has created. Your choices in most industries are essentially McDonald’s or Burger King.

Breaking up monopolies is not a controversial matter. At least it didn’t used to be. America figured out that monopolies shouldn’t exist three decades before it figured out that women should vote. But once computers started appearing in offices, we all just decided that the 1960s were bad because they made racist people mad and a majority of Americans accepted that the conservatives had won the economic argument in defiance of everything that unfolded over the time this stupid belief took root.

Conservative economics is utter garbage. It shrinks the overall pie, concentrates power in the hands of a very few and puts guardrails on the economy by restricting one of the greatest economic powers in existence: reinvestment. That’s what the government is at its best, and an entire ideology opposing that fact has been constructed by a generation of billionaires with more proven determination than their supposed liberal opponents. Biden eschewed this neoliberal standard in his party’s domestic spending agenda when he passed the Inflation Reduction Act, understanding that government revenue is a core part of GDP, and it helped lead the U.S. economy to do better out of Covid than any other Western peer.

Now we are led into a better future by our One True FTC God-Queen in Lina Khan, and busting up monopolies is cool again thanks to parts of the Biden administration and a new emerging Democratic consensus that shifts power away from the market. If the Department of Justice goes through with this trial balloon they are surely floating in the press to see how it is received by markets (Alphabet shares fell 2.35% today, a very manageable loss, especially in the context of the chaos of the last week), it will be the largest breakup of a company by the United States government since that communist Ronald Reagan did it to AT&T in 1982.

Yet again I find myself intoning the Reagan administration as a force for fucking good as a marker of how broken and far-right the status quo has become, but luckily for Joe Biden, we are in the domestic policy realm–where he far surpasses the Republican baseline–instead of in foreign policy, where he has created a new kind of evil that falls fall short of Reagan’s depravity.

Break Up Google So Splinter Can Live

Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the United States and a harbinger of monopolistic and journalistic doom in their own right, sued Google last year, alleging they have a monopoly over the digital ad market and that “newspapers’ advertising revenue has declined by 70 percent since 2009” when Google began this march to monopolize the industry.

I’m no lawyer, just some blogger who lost their job in 2020 after Google tweaked their ad revenue model to devalue politics near the height of their market share dominance, but I agree with the evil guys saying that Google is eviler.

Google, Amazon and Meta comprise over fifty percent of the global digital advertising market, which is projected to grow to $1 trillion by 2026. This ruling found that Google alone controls ninety percent of the ad market for publishers. The story of the collapse of digital media is very simple: Google (and Meta) took all the money.

Which is why when Paste Magazine re-launched Splinter and Jezebel under its leadership, we added a subscription tier (Subscribe to Splinter! Subscribe to Jezebel!). The vast majority of the content will still be free and paid for by ads we hopefully can make more money from in a post-Google monopoly world, but as Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo has written, the only sustainable online content businesses over the decade-plus that coincided with Google’s ad dominance are ones that did not depend on it.

The traditional eyeballs for ads business model has served journalism for centuries. It is only in our recent, more archaic times that that this notion has come under fire. The internet did not change this dynamic, as there are still ads next to every single word I have ever written on it–but where that ad money goes has changed in a world where America decided that the tried-and-true methods to build broad-based prosperity were a bunch of hippie bullshit.

The newspaper business used to be seen as ultra-lucrative because of all that consistent ad revenue. Now writing for a living is hell on earth from a business perspective because America stopped believing in antitrust laws and Google’s “don’t be evil” motto was just an ironic form of branding, yet somehow there’s a bunch of media VC dipshits out there who don’t know that any of this happened. If the DOJ does the right thing, it will be another data point proving this is no longer Barack Obama and Bill Clinton’s superficial party, and it is trending towards one that believes monopolies are bad, actually.