Kamala Harris has been short on ideas recently on how she would govern differently than President Biden. Here’s a suggestion: promise to cut off Biden’s antitrust attack dogs.
Google is currently awaiting penalty from Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), which alleges the company operates as a monopoly in digital advertising, causing consumer harm. The issue is Google paying Apple to make its search engine the default option on products like iPhones. The Biden administration calls this “self-preferencing” and seeks to ban Google from engaging in such partnerships.
What’s plainly missed by the Biden administration is that Google’s arrangement with Apple has less to do with Google’s proverbial “self” as it does Apple being “consumer-preferencing.”
Consider McDonald’s exclusively offering Coca-Cola beverages in its stores. If McDonald’s replaced its Coca-Cola product line with kombucha, beverage sales would likely plummet. McDonald’s isn’t the reason for Coke’s popularity; its soda was already successful. The partnership is merely an outcome of that success. McDonald’s offers a “default option” of Coca-Cola because it’s what its customers prefer.
Bearing this in mind, Google’s situation is reminiscent of an economic chicken-or-the-egg scenario wherein the question lies “is Google a success because of its exclusive partnerships, or are its exclusive partnerships the result of its success?”
The belief here is that it’s the latter. Remember that in the early days of AOL, its platform used to “self-prefer” Yahoo News by making it the default website on its Internet platform. Yahoo, or any business, would surely love to see its services receive prominent “shelf space,” but as is obvious, AOL’s self-preferencing of Yahoo News didn’t achieve long-term success for either entity. The mere contractual agreement isn’t sufficient to make it so, without the vote of the consumer.
Apple made Google its default search engine because its unparalleled browsing capabilities made the internet accessible in a way that was never before possible. Because we depend on it so much, no user of Google’s search engine should want to see this search capacity arbitrarily undermined by the government. Readers have surely tried other traditional search engines – yet more often than not, we return to Google for a reason.
In addition to the Biden administration seeking to prevent Google from engaging in rather basic business partnerships, another potential remedy the DOJ is considering includes forcing Google to make its data available to other competitors, raising significant privacy concerns. The government forcibly transferring vast amounts of private data over to any entity should be a red flag.
Google is not the only company targeted in the Biden Administration’s antitrust witch hunt, but its trial is of unique importance given its standing as a leader in developing AI technology. Oddly, the DOJ claims Google’s leadership in AI is one of the reasons it should face penalty. This overlooks the critical importance of ensuring America wins the race in developing technology that will prove to be a historic lifesaver. Why would we want to kneecap our industry leaders?
Voters are looking for Kamala Harris to present a new vision for the future. She should start by distancing herself from Biden’s trustbusters who threaten American innovation and competitiveness in the tech sector.
Not only are consumers not being harmed by Google, Apple made its search engine the default setting just for them.
