“Google is a monopolist.” What has long been asserted by big tech skeptics is now the official position of the US district court for DC.
Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google broke antitrust law by spending tens of billions annually to secure default search engine status across major web browsers, including Safari and Firefox. This coordinated campaign resulted in Google securing 90% of the global search market, despite its engine increasingly answering queries with spam pages, AI gibberish and product placements.
The court has yet to determine Google’s penalties. But this opinion marks a turning point in the ongoing fight to regulate Silicon Valley. It also gives reason for optimism about other pending federal litigation against the Magnificent Seven, including a separate justice department suit against – you guessed it – Google. More importantly, this latest decision serves as a compelling reminder that pro-competition agendas can prevail if only our leaders have the courage to take on the fight.
And in a presidential election year, one potential measure by which voters might assess the current candidates is their willingness to take on a sector that supermajorities of Republicans and Democrats think has too much power. For a potential Harris administration, big tech monopolists make for a clear and worthy antagonist against whom to campaign – and deliver a prosecutorial blow.
While Google might be the top search result for “antitrust violations”, the problem extends well beyond Mountain View. Amazon artificially uplifts its own products. Meta has gobbled up Instagram and WhatsApp so it can capture consumers with a one-two punch of image- and text-based screen addiction. And Apple continues to stigmatize defectors with the green text bubbles that might as well be 21st-century scarlet letters. No wonder the FTC and justice department are suing all three of these companies. They lead an industry that seems to have made a competition of anti-competition.
Perhaps because Silicon Valley’s misbehavior has become so blatant, public interest remedies have finally won a measure of bipartisan support. Republican attorneys general and liberal thinktanks alike have argued that tech companies like Google deliver essential services – similar to public electricity or water providers – and they should be regulated as such. By being designated as “common carriers”, tech companies would have to operate in the public interest, ceasing all discriminatory tactics that favor themselves and harm competitors and consumers alike. Though Republicans hail the idea as anti-censorship – out of a misguided sense that Mark Zuckerberg is out to stifle, rather than profit from, conservative ideology – progressives have agreed with Machiavelli (just this once) that the ends justify the means.
Beyond individual policies, the Democratic party also has the chance to attempt something grander: resurrecting the zealous monopoly-busting spirit of its New Deal and Great Society heyday. That means sidelining the “golf-buddy Democrats”, to borrow a phrase from the constitutional lawyer Zephyr Teachout, once and for all. By returning the party’s central constituency to the actual producers of goods, Democrats can pursue a full agenda of antitrust reforms, from hiking fees for big mergers to forcing companies to divest from lines of business that conflict with each other.
This kind of transformative pivot is already under way thanks to arguably the most populist plank of President Biden’s legacy: his appointment of intrepid regulators such as the FTC chairperson, Lina Khan. After revolutionizing American antitrust law with a single essay as a JD student, Khan has taken the reins of the nation’s top antitrust regulator and put her ambitious theories into practice. And she’s not alone. Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and Gary Gensler, chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), have both pursued gritty enforcement of consumer protections. By empowering this cohort of regulators, Biden has reinjected executive authority into the alphabet agencies to regulate, well, Alphabet.
And yet, despite this momentum, Khan and Co’s crusade might come to a screeching halt no matter who wins in November. Though the Trump administration originally filed the milestone suit against Google, the former president’s regulatory impulses seem to be guided by personal vendettas rather than concern for consumers. Take, for instance, his recent courtship of crypto. And while JD Vance has expressed support for Khan, his sincerity is equally questionable given that he used to work for Peter Thiel. A second Trump term wouldn’t so much vanquish our tech overlords as give us new ones, exchanging Zuckerberg for the Winklevoss twins.
But Kamala Harris has also shown mixed loyalties on the issue. A Bay Area native, she’s facing pressure from advisers and donors alike to embrace crypto and dump Lina Khan. Harris donors such as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman have called for Khan’s ouster and the rollback of antitrust enforcement, to which Harris’s team has only demurred, saying “we haven’t had any discussions”.
When asked directly on CNBC about Hoffman’s comments about Khan and “whether we will hear about a shift in her [Harris’s] regulatory views?” a close ally of Harris, the Maryland governor, Wes Moore, responded, “I think we will and I think we have to.” On another segment this week, Roger Altman of the Wall Street investment bank Evercore agreed that Khan had to go and was too “extreme”. However, he criticized Hoffman’s strategy and the “Silicon Valley types who are clamoring publicly for Lina Khan’s head”, because doing so out in the open allows progressives to fight back against it. A Wall Street veteran knows the more shrewd path is to use leverage behind the scenes and in the shadows.
Still, Harris has branded herself as a strong prosecutor unafraid of taking on predators, fraudsters and cheaters, so standing strong against the data barons would match her messaging and, ostensibly, her values. Ironically, though, Harris’s current ambivalence shows the potency of Biden’s antitrust accomplishments. “We didn’t see this in recent elections,” Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has argued, “because the Democratic party was Wall Street-friendly”. It will demand movement building and strategic resistance, but to paraphrase a term of art from Harris, we are not going back.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of the Nation, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times
