Antitrust: Google hates talking about ‘market share’
Of the four Big Tech companies that appeared before Congress last month, Google has the most to fear, said Richard Nieva in CNET.com. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took more questions (62) from lawmakers than Google parent Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai (61). But Google is “in the most imminent danger of antitrust action.” The company processes about 90 percent of the online searches in the U.S., fueling its digital advertising business, which makes up most of its $160 billion in annual sales. That stranglehold is what committee members like Rep. David Cicilline seized on, accusing Google of abusing its position as the “gateway to the web” to promote its own services.
Other businesses’ reliance on Google “has only grown during the pandemic, when the internet has become the main avenue of commercial life,” said Mark Bergen and Shelly Banjo in Bloomberg Businessweek. Consider the plight of a therapist trying to get noticed right now. In 2019, Ellen Ross had to spend only about $20 per day to get her practice to appear at the top of Google search results for “therapists near me” in the San Jose area. But the pandemic lockdowns rendered such searches useless. Ross was left bidding for ad space against “proliferating virtual therapy startups” like TalkSpace and BetterHelp. Google points to “its fierce rivalry with Facebook and Amazon, but for therapists, lawyers, and anyone offering a service, this argument is bogus.” People go to Facebook for baby pictures, not to find a local business.
Google’s most frequent defense is that despite its dominance in search, it doesn’t control enough of the digital ad industry “to overcharge its customers and box out its competitors,” said David McCabe in The New York Times. A “67-page document sent to Australian regulators” laid out arguments Google will likely use in the U.S., including that Google’s bidding system has made buying ads more efficient for small businesses. If Google had its way, we wouldn’t talk about “market share” at all, said Adrianne Jeffries in TheMarkup.org. In internal documents, Googlers are warned away from the words and advised that “we use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search.’”
Google’s problems go beyond language, said The Economist— or antitrust. Alphabet, Google’s parent, now has a whole herd of businesses, but Google still generates 83 percent of its revenue. New employees who come in expecting a grand strategy instead find a company that often tries to solve problems by “throwing money at them and hiring more bodies.” The main risk for Google is not antitrust action but the traditional big-company perils: “lack of innovation and declining growth.”