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Google 'overwhelmingly' dominates search market, antitrust committee states [1]

['Jennifer Elias']

Date: 2020-10-06

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, speaks to the media before the opening of the Berlin representation of Google Germany in Berlin on January 22, 2019.

Google created a wide-ranging monopoly that includes favoring its own services and demoting others, a U.S. government antitrust subcommittee argued in an antitrust report Thursday.

The House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, which released its investigation findings of Big Tech's competitive behavior Tuesday, stated that the Alphabet -owned company has held its domination in markets ranging from search to advertising to maps by favoring its own services and demoting third parties — often at the command of executives. The report also warned of furthering "potential" unfair behavior in the company's growing cloud business and its Fitbit acquisition proposal.

The nearly 450-page report, which was overseen by the Democratic majority on the committee, included information gathered through hearings, interviews and 1.3 million documents. It concludes that Google, as well as Amazon , Apple and Facebook , enjoyed monopoly power and suggested Congress take up changes to antitrust laws that could force them to split apart parts of their businesses and make it harder to complete acquisitions.

"The overwhelmingly dominant provider of general online search is Google, which captures around 81% of all general search queries in the U.S. on desktop and 94% on mobile," the report says.

"Google abused its gatekeeper power over online search to coerce vertical websites to surrender valuable data and to leverage its search dominance into adjacent markets," the report states. "Google used its search engine dominance and control over the Android operating system to grow its share of the web browser market and favor its other lines of business," it added.

In a statement, Google accused the lawmakers of looking more at helping competitors than consumers.

"Google's free products like Search, Maps and Gmail help millions of Americans and we've invested billions of dollars in research and development to build and improve them. We compete fairly in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry. We disagree with today's reports, which feature outdated and inaccurate allegations from commercial rivals about Search and other services.

"Americans simply don't want Congress to break Google's products or harm the free services they use every day. The goal of antitrust law is to protect consumers, not help commercial rivals. Many of the proposals bandied about in today's reports -- whether breaking up companies or undercutting Section 230 -- would cause real harm to consumers, America's technology leadership and the U.S. economy — all for no clear gain."

SEE ALSO:

Facebook is a social network monopoly that buys, copies or kills competitors, antitrust committee finds

Apple’s ‘monopoly power’ over iPhone app distribution gives it outsized profits, Democrats say

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[1] Url: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/06/google-overwhelmingly-dominates-search-market-house-committee-finds.html

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