When people think of the internet, especially searching, they tend to think of Google. After all, Google is the primary search engine where internet users go to discover websites or find something about their website if they do not have their own search engine, or something else. But how often do we use Google as the primary search engine for the internet? How often do we use alternative sites such as Bing or DuckDuckGo, which boats that its site does not track you? The answer is not very much. Google is considered one of the big four tech giants in Silicon Valley—the other being Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. According to The Verge, the site hit one billion users in 2018, twenty years after its launch in 1998. But it was not by winning the competition in the market for search engines, nor for just being the luckiest search engine on the market. Google became the internet’s favorite search engine by rigging the market itself, setting a monopoly, by paying money to constantly keep getting ahead of the game. Consider Safari. The app we all use on our iPhones if we want to access the internet on it. What is the website it opens to first when you tap it? Google. The app opens to Google instead of Bing is because Google has been paying Apple $9 billion to make the site Safari’s primary search engine. Since Apple is the biggest market for mobile phones, Google can reach the widest audience in mobile phones because it pays Apple to place it ahead of its competitors. In fact, money has become the key component for why Google became a behemoth in Big Tech over the past twenty years since its creation. The most notable acquisition to Google is YouTube, the video-sharing platform site that is considered the gold standard for content creators also not due to winning the competition. With YouTube now being owned by Google, competition with YouTube in the video-sharing platform site. Since there is no competition, content creators have no choice but to work with YouTube if they want to reach a wide audience, whether they agree with their business practices or not. Granted, YouTube faced copyright issues that could have forced it into bankruptcy, so it makes sense why YouTube would sell to Google. But the benefit of becoming financially secure cannot be overlooked by the lack of a competitor. Competitors are one the key aspects for setting up a great marketplace. With competition, companies strive to constantly put out the best product while providing the best customer service. If an entire marketplace becomes controlled by a single company, that is considered a monopoly. And monopolies are devastating for the economy. If a company runs a monopoly, then it is not motivated to make its products efficient for customers, and at a price they can set if they are customers’ only option. The controversy surrounding Google echoes the monopoly set by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the late 19th-century. Standard Oil ran a monopoly by purchasing companies that were either rivals or just starting, allowing it to control 90 percent of the United States’ oil refineries and pipelines. When Rockefeller held enough power, he was able to bully railroad companies that needed his oil to function to set cheap, fixed prices. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled its monopoly illegal, and ordered it to break up. The Supreme Court ruled it because it violated the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which banned monopolies. The Sherman Antitrust Act has formed the basis for the U.S. Justice Department’s recently launched lawsuit against Google in October 2020. The Justice Department claimed in its lawsuit that Google became a behemoth by buying its way to power such as the aforementioned buyouts and acquisitions. Breaking up Google, of course, will be difficult. Pursuing antitrust cases through the courts, Leah Nylen writes, requires judges to “make complicated predictions about the future and they’re often afraid of making things worse”. The Supreme Court’s decision to break apart Standard Oil in 1911 is the only instance of a U.S. federal court breaking up a company in the entire history of the United States. So, there is only a single point of reference the Department of Justice can make when it comes to the Supreme Court breaking up a company, and that was a century ago in a different time. And Google has, despite running an apparent monopoly, been doing a lot of things users love about it. So, there is fear that Google users will leave if the site no longer provides the service they love, and thus diminish Google even further. But that is based on Google making its case that endless acquisitions benefit its own businesses. With competition, users will not have to rely on a single source to provide the service they want. We should break up Google before they have a chance to, hypothetically speaking, practically become owners of the internet. CITATIONS Ghaffary, Shirin, and Rani Molla. “The DOJ Antitrust Lawsuit against Google, Explained.” Vox, 20 Oct. 2020, www.vox.com/recode/21524710/google-antitrust-lawsuit-doj-search-trump-bill-barr. History.com Editors. “John D. Rockefeller.” HISTORY, 9 Oct. 2019, www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/john-d-rockefeller. Luckerson, Victor. “A Decade Ago, Google Bought YouTube — and It Was the Best Tech Deal Ever.” The Ringer, 10 Oct. 2016, www.theringer.com/2016/10/10/16042354/google-youtube-acquisition-10-years-tech-deals-69fdbe1c8a06. Nylen, Leah. “Why Breaking up (Google) Is so Hard to Do.” POLITICO, 21 Oct. 2020, www.politico.com/news/2020/10/20/doj-antitrust-suit-against-google-430545. Staff, Verge. “Google Turns 20: How an Internet Search Engine Reshaped the World.” The Verge, 27 Sept. 2018, www.theverge.com/2018/9/5/17823490/google-20th-birthday-anniversary-history-milestones.

**Breaking up Google by improving antitrust laws would increase consumer welfare without creating so much market fragmentation that new problems emerge.** - Recently, the United States government has taken up several cases against "Big Tech," including Google and Facebook, for monopolizing the internet. U.S. Congressman David Cicilline has given a [statement](https://www.freepressjournal.in/business/unregulated-tech-monopolies-have-too-much-power-over-economy-new-bills-could-force-big-tech-breakups): "Right now, unregulated tech monopolies have too much power over our economy. They are in a unique position to pick winners and losers, destroy small businesses, raise prices on consumers, and put folks out of work. Our agenda will level the playing field and ensure the wealthiest, most powerful tech monopolies play by the same rules as the rest of us." - [Antitrust laws](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/antitrust-laws) are accordingly in the process of being revised for the newer era of Big Tech: --> Breaking them up: Banning the big companies from owning other businesses in which they can unfairly squash the competition and skew consumers towards their product. In other words, preventing Big Tech from operating as, at the same time, both platforms and competition on those platforms. This is a hard thing to do. Proposed legislation tries to solve this by creating new legal categories called "covered platforms" that come with restrictions for "online platforms with 50 million or more monthly active users, annual sales or market value of over $600 billion, and a role as a “critical trading partner.” --> Crossing use and data over: Allowing users on one platform to communicate with those on another; facilitating the easy transfer of data from one platform to another. --> Squashing favoritism: Similar to a "break up", disallowing tech giants from favoring their own products and services over other competitors on their platforms. --> Making it hard to merge: Allowing regulators to block acquisitions of other companies by tech giants, effectively prohibiting unfair mergers. --> Increasing enforcement measures: Giving the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) more money and power to enforce the antitrust laws. Increasing tech merger filing fees for proposed tech mergers worth over $500 million and cutting fees for those below that amount is one way to do this that the new legislation mentions. - Breaking up Google in the above ways would benefit consumer welfare. Much more beyond that, though, and perhaps the pendulum would swing both back and even possibly very far the other way: --> Breaking up big existing companies and their products and services into too many pieces would lead to a feeling of choice for the consumer, but ultimately, users might feel too fragmented across the abundance of services and start to desire instead to stick with one platform, potentially undoing the break-up anyway. --> Having tons of start-ups offering a competitive range of new products and services would be nice, but startups cannot benefit from a free business model, so users would likely have to pay a ton for all the different services they used. It's doubtful many would want or be able to do this. --> Research and development enabled by Big Tech's investments into things such as AI and COVID-19 elimination would be more liable to go away. - Overall, a mid-wise approach seems like it might best do the trick. Deepening antitrust laws for the era of Big Tech without fracturing the value of companies so far that new problems arise seems like it could be a good solution.

"Google, baby, this just aint workin. You've changed."

**Break Up Google is not the only way that governments have tried to tackle the monopolies posed by Big Tech.** • In 2018, Facebook and the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica faced [heavy scrutiny](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election) for harvesting psychological data about Facebook users in order to influence their choices for the 2016 US presidential election. • In June 2021, G7 leaders agreed to commit to a global minimum corporation tax rate of [at least 15%](https://www.publicaffairsnetworking.com/news/g7-and-the-future-of-big-tech-what-did-we-learn-). This means that countries such as Amazon, Google and Facebook will pay more tax in the countries that they operate in than they currently do. • In July 2021, Amazon was fined [€746mil](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-30/amazon-given-record-888-million-eu-fine-for-data-privacy-breach) by the EU for processing personal data in violation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.