The amount of lawsuits against Google, on privacy and antitrust are such that some changes are coming to Google, and they will be rather drastic.
December 2, 2024
By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP
Google is a massive digital ecosystem. In the advertising world, it’s a massive walled-garden with its own proprietary activations. It cannot and will not integrate with any other services or platforms.
Alphabet owns a lot of properties, that’s for sure. Google is the biggest search engine in the world, which is part of its larger AdSense arm. It has its hand in life sciences, venture capital, internet services, cell phones, smart homes, and security just to name some.
In just under 30 years Alphabet Inc. has become a juggernaut in the digital space, which has drawn a lot of negative attention.
To that end, some changes are coming to Google. Google is a household name, and in fact has become a verb in common parlance. We don’t search for things. We “google” them. The ubiquity of a brand is a mark of its success, but it sometimes attracts the litigious.
Antitrust
A LOT of cases have been brought against Google ranging from privacy, advertising, censorship, defamation, intellectual property, discrimination, and antitrust. It’s a massive multinational corporation, so it’s to be expected.
Some cases are proving to be more significant than others, especially when the government is the plaintiff. Google was hit with three antitrust suits in the last three months, in fact.
- A DoJ case to do with its online advertising technology alleging anti-competitive practices which give Google an unfair advantage.
- A suit brought by several states alleging a monopoly over the Google Play Store app distribution in that Google insists everyone use their system of payment.
- A continuing case regarding its search engine dominance, alleging another monopoly because manufacturers make Chrome the default search engine. This apparently limits their choice.
This doesn’t include the other three antitrust cases out of the EU:
Google lost its final legal challenge on Tuesday [October 8, 2024] against a European Union penalty for giving its own shopping recommendations an illegal advantage over rivals in search results, ending a long-running antitrust case that came with a whopping fine.
The European Union’s Court of Justice upheld a lower court’s decision, rejecting the company’s appeal against the 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) penalty from the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust enforcer.
There are two others on appeal to do with the Android mobile OS and Google’s ad serving platform.
Google has been settling and paying out for years, and that might not be enough anymore. Some changes are coming to Google, and the Justice Department is prepared with several asks.
Privacy
Within the last year, Google has been in and out of privacy suits. Last December Google settled to pay $5 billion in a consumer privacy lawsuit. This settlement was at the federal level, but it didn’t preclude individuals from making their own claims against the tech giant.
The judge won’t allow a class action suit, so instead this year several firms representing 96,000 clients in nearly 2,000 cases filed in California state court since March.
That case went to an appellate court, wherein the judges overruled the initial refusal to accept the case as a class action suit. So now, this is a class action suit.
Some changes are coming to Google, alright. This confluence of lawsuits, is untenable, and the government is going to have something to say about it.
The Fallout
It’s not just the billions in fines anymore. Some changes are coming to Google for sure.
On the antitrust side of things, it looks like these are the demands coming down the pike:
- Google to sell off Chrome and Android.
- Google may not reenter the browser market for five years, and would be prohibited from “acquiring any interests in search rivals, potential entrants, and rival search or search ads-related AI products,” and it must release any it already has.
- Stop all “anticompetitive payments to distributors, including Apple” made to ensure Google is the default search engine on various companies’ devices.
- Google offer “data crawling rights” to parties such as content creators, so that they can choose to opt-out of, Google using their work to train its Large Language Model AI.
- If the DoJ cannot get both Chrome and Android, they will recommend selling off Android
On the privacy side, this is part of a settlement in a lawsuit accusing Google of illegal surveillance. The suit accused Google of tracking Chrome users’ internet activity even when they had switched the browser to the “Incognito” setting which should protect users from being tracked by the company.
- Google has agreed to purge billions of records containing personal information collected from more than 136 million people in the U.S. surfing the internet through its Chrome web browser.
- The settlement requires Google to make clearer privacy disclosures about Chrome’s Incognito feature so users know how Incognito mode functions and what information is still collected even while using it.
- Give more options to users in their accounts to manage what data is collected and how it’s used within the Google ecosystem.
- Allow users to set time limits for how long their data is stored before it’s automatically deleted.
Whether you use Google or not, it is interesting to see how these tech companies amass so much to the point where they can’t seem to manage themselves very well. They make so much money off data collection, they have to be taken to court to stop it. They get so much momentum, they buy up or outbid their would-be competition and people are left with just them. Amazon is facing similar issues. Both Google and Amazon pioneered an online endeavor that rose to such dominance, it is difficult to imagine living without it sometimes.
Your privacy is the most important asset in the balance here, though. It’s worth investing in a VPN and some other privacy protections for you, your family and your business. Relying on Google to do that for you is clearly not a strong game plan.
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