Let’s spend a few minutes today catching up on the antitrust inquiries into Google. There are investigations related to competition underway against most of the biggest tech giants – Apple, Facebook, and Amazon face similar inquiries, and their CEOS are scheduled to join Sundar Pichai for a virtual hearing with the House of Representatives later this month. But there’s reason to believe the case against Google will land the soonest of any of them — in May, the New York Times reported that charges could come “as early as this summer.”
Scrutiny into the company’s business practices has since accelerated. Politico reported last week that California, which sat out an investigation led by 48 attorneys general, is preparing to mount its own inquiry into Google’s competition practices. As Leah Nylen noted in that report: “Alabama is now the only state that is not investigating the company.”
At the same time, reporters are mounting their own investigations of their own, and everywhere they look, they find Google giving preference to its own products over those of its competitors.
