Google a 'threat to democracy'
Never before has a single entity had so much control over so much information as Google does today. The threat it poses to democracy is unprecedented, and the methods it has used to attain that power are at best unfair and perhaps illegal. The people need to take power back from Big Tech, and the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is the best hope to start doing so.
Google was just one-tenth of its current size when it bought an online advertising company called DoubleClick in 2007. At the time, DoubleClick acted as a middleman between advertisers who wanted to buy online space, and publishers, such as the Washington Examiner, who wanted to sell it. Google had always made money selling advertisements on its own search engine, but it wanted to leverage its market power in search, and video market power via YouTube, to become the dominant middleman in all of online advertising.
It worked. By controlling information coming into and going out of the online advertising market, and by forcing advertisers to buy ads across Google’s online properties, such as YouTube, it obtained a monopoly in online advertising. When you see an advertisement on The New York Times or the Washington Examiner, no matter who the advertiser is, that advertisement was probably bought and sold through Google’s marketplace, and it took a very hefty cut.
Industry studies say Google takes 30-50% of all revenue spent on advertising. That means if Joe’s Meats buys a $1,000 ad on the Peoria Journal Star’s website, Google gets up to $500. No wonder small papers are dying. While traffic to news sites is up 39% since 2014, revenue produced by news publications is down 58%. Like a parasite, Google has grown fat by sucking revenue from publishers everywhere.
More than 35 states are suing Google in federal court alleging that it broke state antitrust laws by abusing its market power in search and video to create an online advertising monopoly. The Department of Justice is considering a similar suit alleging Google broke federal antitrust law.
These suits might find that Google broke the law but they won’t make publishers whole and no court settlement can match the power of negotiations between equal market participants. Publishers need to be allowed to work to take on Google directly. That is what the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act does.
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This blog is published on Google and it use to generate ad revenues that Google shared with me. About the time that Trump was elected those ad revenues disappeared. Google also abuses its power by censoring information its geeks disagree with. This is yet more evidence of what can be argued is monopoly power. Google also changed its search engine to discriminate against conservative blogs and information sources like Breitbart. This also reduced potential ad revenues.
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