Unbreaking the internet

US antitrust officials have woken up to the monopolies that Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon and the like are enjoying

Monday was supposed to be Apple’s day. In a sprawling 2½-hour launch, the iphone maker announced a raft of software enhancements, including a new operating system (OS) for ipads, the killing off of itunes and upgrades to the iphone’s OS. A lot of it was hyperbole and an effort to catch up with Android or other apps.

But the big news on Monday was that the US department of justice would investigate Google and

Apple, while the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking into Facebook and Amazon. All four are accused of anticompetitive tactics for promoting their own services over those of rivals.

Google has already been fined three times by the EU, for a total of €8.2bn, for anticompetitive behaviour.

As Republican legislator David Cicilline said this week: “This is long overdue.” US lawmakers have been furious about the unfettered power that Big Tech wields, while Democratic presidential contenders (led by senator Elizabeth Warren) are calling for these companies to be split up.

Both the justice department and FTC reportedly still need to begin their investigations. The FTC is already working on the 2011 consent decree that Facebook signed to let its users know if their privacy had been breached — which it clearly didn’t in the Cambridge Analytica saga.

It’s a marked turnaround from

previous government attitudes to the Big Tech giants. Facebook was able to buy two seemingly rival services (Instagram and Whatsapp) without competition authorities batting an eyelid. Facebook’s new “pivot to privacy” announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year hardly makes sense for rigorous competition. Similarly, as the largest sellers of online advertising, Google and Facebook, have not been operating in a competitive market and could therefore have sold cheaper advertising.

In a court case launched in October 2018, Facebook is accused of overstating its video views by as much as 900% — and hiding this information for more than a year. Sound familiar? The company was accused in 2016 of overstating video views (which it defined as a whole three seconds) by 60%-80%. We have a word for that: lying.

Meanwhile, Twitter said it “accidentally” silenced critics of the Chinese government during the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square this month; and while Facebook pledged to take down antivaccination misinformation, it still recommended it on its main platform and Instagram. Youtube has been showing recommendations of children doing innocent things as “an open gate for paedophiles”, as the New York Times described it.

The “internet is broken”, Cicilline said. Someone has to fix it before it’s ruined for successive generations.

Google and Facebook have not been operating in a competitive market