Google should be afraid of US scrutiny

This is the moment the US technology superpowers surely knew was coming: The US government is preparing to crawl all over Google to figure out whether it is an abusive monopolist. Google parent company Alphabet Inc. and the other tech giants should be quaking in their fleece vests.
Bloomberg News and other news organisations reported that the US Department of Justice is preparing to open an investigation into Google’s compliance with antitrust laws. If it goes forward, an investigation will no doubt be broad, lengthy, messy, and impossible for Google and its investors to predict.
That should terrify Google and every other big technology company — because there’s no guarantee that the antitrust Klieg light will turn on one company alone.
This isn’t Google’s first antitrust rodeo. The US Federal Trade Commission in 2013 closed without further action its own antitrust investigation into whether Google wielded its dominant web search engine like a cudgel to disadvantage rivals, drive up prices for advertisers and ultimately harm consumers.
And in recent years, the European Union antitrust watchdog imposed billions of dollars in fines after finding antitrust violations, including over how Google conducted business with its Android smartphone software and its internet shopping service. In the US and elsewhere, politicians from all party stripes have sought to attack Google or other tech giants for various perceived sins, including being too big for the good of industry and consumers. Being Google has meant dealing with perennial regulatory and political nightmares.
Antitrust investigations are difficult to predict. Once the US government pores over every internal email and business development contract, there’s no telling what it will turn up.
It’s worth remembering that Google narrowly escaped a possible antitrust lawsuit the last time the US looked closely. Portions of communications between FTC commissioners and staff later showed that staffers wanted to bring an antitrust lawsuit on a few matters including on what they said was Google’s strong-arm tactics to scrape information from websites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor without their permission to improve Google’s search engine. Ultimately FTC commissioners unanimously voted not to pursue a lawsuit and possibly a breakup of what was then a smaller Google.
Washington is much different than it was in 2013, and sentiment in the capitol and beyond has soured as US technology superstars have grown even larger and more dominant. An investigation of Google is likely to be politically popular on both the left and the right. The politics and the optics aren’t in Google’s favour. Now we’ll see – again – whether the law is against the company as well.
—Bloomberg

Shira Ovide is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. She previously was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal