THEAmerican antitrust put its sights on the giants of Silicon Valley. Monday the Ministry of Justice of Washington and the Federal Trade Commission – the agency that deals with competition – have announced the division of tasks: the first (now led by William Barr, a Trump loyalist), will deal with Google, while the second will turn the spotlight on Facebook and Amazon.
Il Wall Street Journal, moreover, has published an indiscretion according to which an investigation on Google is about to be triggered.
The two pieces of news hit the Stock Exchange like an avalanche, where yesterday the shares of Big G and Facebook lost more than 7% during the session. The sales also hit other giants like Amazon and Apple, to the point that the entire technology index Nasdaq it was dragged into a correction phase: -10% compared to the historic peak reached in May.
For Californian tech giants, this kind of trouble is hardly new. Just under a year ago, the European Union fined Google 5,1 billion dollars for abuse of its dominant position (in that case, the target was the automatic installation of the search engine in Android smartphones, representing 80% of the total). This year, however, the Community Antitrust has imposed a new sanction on Google for an abuse of a dominant position through AdSense.
So far, the US has been more permissive towards large technology companies, also because the sector is almost completely deregulated. Recently, however, something has changed.
Facebook's privacy violations exposed in the scandal of Cambridge Analytica, together with protests from competitors of Amazon or Google, have also induced the American authorities to move.
And, for once, the initiative brings together the two extremities of American politics: from Donald Trump (who accuses Google of downplaying right-wing political news and criticizes for tax reasons Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post) to the democratic left of Bernie Senders.
Aware that the battle is now upon us, Google is already preparing its team of experts and lawyers, for fear that the judges could impose a fragmentation of the group, as has already happened for the telecommunications giant At&t.
In the case of Google, however, the matter is more complex. Antitrust principles are not enforceable in the traditional sense, because the monopoly exercised by the search engine does not lead to an increase in prices to the detriment of consumers. Rather, it is the market that suffers in terms of pluralism.
