Various other government agencies are probing other major tech compaines, including Facebook, Twitter and Apple.
Antitrust laws are anti-free-market and shouldn't exist. Where monopolies exist, they're almost always created by government action. Google's dominance is largely due to it beating competitors fair-and-square,
I would have to strongly disagree with you on this.
When a company becomes a monopoly, that is unchecked by the government, they effectively become the government, and a regulator, except they do not have accountability that elected officials have. The role of government/regulator does not usually take place until the monopoly has a stronghold in their market for some time, and generally increases over time. Monopolies also will often engage in anti-free market behavior in order to maintain their status.
Take a hypothetical example of Ford hypothetically becoming a monopoly and running all other car manufacturers out of business. They may have
initially obtained their 100% market share by beating out the competition, although they may not play fair once they have this market share. For example, car manufacturers buy various car parts from many suppliers, including tire manufacturers. Any tire manufacturer who supplies tires to Ford is going to rely heavily on Ford for survival, and Ford is likely to be their, by far, largest customer. If a competitor were to try to enter the car market, Ford could refuse to do business with any company who supplies tires to their competitor, and the same with other suppliers of other parts. Any supplier who sells to Fords competitor would go out of business, or at best would see sales decline to nearly zero, except what Ford's competitor buys, who may or may not end up surviving. I would not consider this to be fair, and this would not be Ford
continuing to beat new competitors
fair-and-square.
Ford could also regulate their consumers, and increase this regulation over time. They could initially sell an optional feature included with their cars that will prevent cars from going over the speed limit by using a tracking device and a database of speed limits nationwide. Later, Ford could ship all of their cars with this equipment, but wont activate it unless requested by the customer. Eventually they could make this feature mandatory on all cars. After conducting a "study" they could decide to prevent their new cars from going over 45 MPH, even if the posted speed limit is faster. If someone were to criticize Fords pay practices, or other policies, Ford could effectively disable their car, and prevent the person from getting to work or traveling. Ford would know where the person both lives and works, so if a car is consistently traveling between the person's work and home, and other places the person frequents, Ford could effectively disable that car too.
Moving away from hypotheticals, there is an oligopoly of "Hollywood" movie/TV producers (they are actually located in various parts of the US, but control nearly the entire market), who produce nearly every major movie/TV series. If you are critical of any of these producers, you more or less will not get hired by any of the producers, be it if you are an actor/actress, or some kind of support staff. If you are critical of any of these executives, your career will effectively be over, and you will need to find a new line of work.
Harvy Weinstein took this a step further. He would coerce young women to have sex with him, and would end the career of anyone who refused, tried to speak out, or tried to help anyone who tried to speak out. Women Weinstein wanted to have sex with essentially had to choose between having their career ended, or having sex with him. According to various reports, some were able to avoid having to make this choice by always being with a friend while meeting with Weinstein, and never being alone with him, but others were not so lucky. The reporter who wrote the first article about Weinstein was effectively fired from his job at NBC for working on his Weinstein story, after being given the opportunity to drop the story, but he was lucky enough that another publisher picked him up. This is not a free market, this is something that is very, very wrong on many levels.
In regards to Google, they have an enormous amount of power, and influence. In the 2016 election, they tried to increase hispanic voter turnout by nudging users they believed to be Hispanic to vote, because they believed this would help Clinton (it may not have). Google is known to tinker with their algorithm to display certain articles, information and websites (and suggested searches) in a way that benefits their political beliefs, and hurts causes they are opposed to. Google, on its YouTube platform, has censored many political voices they do not agree with under the bogus guise that these people are using "hate speech".
Google has shown a willingness to censor not only what people can say, but what they can hear. If you are interested in what I have to say on my YouTube channel, but Google does not like what I am saying, they can decide you are not allowed to listen to what I have to say. They effectively have the ability to shift public opinion to how they see fit -- there are limitations to this because there are still competing media platforms that can still state opinions that Google does not like.
Google has effectively become what is effectively a sometimes-propaganda machine. Effective publishers of propaganda will hide the fact they are publishing propaganda, which I believes defeats the argument that others are free to compete with them. I honestly do not know if Google is engaging in similar anti-free market practices described in my hypothetical example above, I presume the DOJ will investigate that.
I don't have any major concerns with Google supporting causes they want to support. I do have major issues with Google using what I perceive to be deception to influence public opinion.
