It’s not a great time to be a huge technology company, but Google seems to be really in the hot seat these days.
New reports today from Reuters detail the progress of not one but two multistate antitrust probes into Google’s business activities.
In addition to a prior effort coordinated amongst all 50 states and led by Texas, Diane Bartz and Paresh Dave, writing on current happenings, identify another Colorado/Nebraska axis bringing its own complaint against the company.
“The bipartisan group — made up of Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah — is sometimes referred to as the Colorado/Nebraska group and has said it planned to combine its case with the federal government’s,” Bartz and Dave write.
This is in addition to an ongoing struggle between the federal Department of Justice and Google over access to information in other investigations around the company’s practices.
“Concerns about … disclosures have emerged since the government sued Google, alleging abuse of its power to thwart competition,” explained a Bloomberg/L.A. Times writer last week, following the conflict. “The Justice Department and Google have clashed over the extent of access to information collected by the government before it sued. … The Justice Department has proposed allowing companies that provided information to designate their most sensitive documents as ‘highly confidential,’ which would prevent access by Google’s in-house lawyers, according to court papers. The U.S. argues that allowing the search giant to see the proprietary information would give Google even more power in the market than it already has.”
Then there’s the threat of antitrust action against Google in the U.K. after Brexit, where officials there may be looking at Google’s place in an online advertising market worth 14 billion English Pounds.
Stateside, some of this feeding frenzy may be ameliorated by problems with the Texas Attorney General’s office, but in general, these various investigations are moving forward. Keep all of this in mind of any of your holdings have to do with Google’s corporate empire.
