This week’s monopoly round-up has lots of news, as usual, including some victories for the Antitrust Division, the government causing big health insurance stocks to tumble, and a privacy bill deal in Congress.
Over the last ten years, we’ve heard increasing criticism of ‘Big Tech’ – the handful of trillion-dollar giants that organize the information commons in our society – resulting in the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission bringing sweeping antitrust lawsuits against Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and – most recently – Apple.
The answer to that question requires an understanding of the facts and evidence in the case itself, Google’s acquisition history, and the purpose of remedies to unfetter markets from anticompetitive conduct and restore competition where it was constrained.
Epic showed how Google forced agreements on smartphone manufacturers that required pre-installation and prominent placement of the Play Store on hundreds of millions of devices.
Such a remedy can be broad-based, anything from monetary damages to break-ups to creating internal compliance departments to voiding unlawful contracts to banning senior executives from the industry.
We’ll know Epic’s request soon enough, Google will file its own more limited proposal, and dueling economic experts will jump in another of Judge Donato’s “hot tubs” at the end of May.
The original article contains 2,345 words, the summary contains 207 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!