Google, Meta antitrust: Fmr. CFPB director explains what's next
Meta Platforms (META) and Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) Google face ongoing cases with antitrust regulators in the US.
Former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Rohit Chopra, joins Morning Brief with Brad Smith and Madison Mills to discuss the antitrust cases.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here.
Where do you anticipate this going? Is is there a likelihood here of Google being broken up?
Well, I think what everyone agrees with is that we're all better off when the internet is free, fair, and really open for new business. And we wouldn't have a Google or a Facebook if there was not anti-trust action against Microsoft a generation ago. So where Google stands is, it's essentially been told it's guilty on two fronts, uh including a really important part of our economy, which is online ad sales. So, the judge has ruled that Google has engaged in an illegal monopolization scheme, and now the next step is to determine how to restore fairness in this market. We all want to see advertisers get a competitive rate for their online ads, and we also want to see local media and small content creators be able to monetize. And Google has been taxing both sides, and the court will now determine how to fix that.
You know, Rohit, I I was taking a look at what the remedies proposal looks like coming forward from Google and and I'm sure you've already kind of dove into this as well. And and I just wonder of the remedies that they're talking about with regard to browser agreements and and Android contracts as well, and then the third prong of it, which was oversight and compliance, which allows them essentially to retain that oversight and compliance but do some more regular reporting from my own kind of summation of it without giving the government's kind of excessive oversight into it. Does that check any of the boxes that are being put forward here in these proceedings?
Well, as you can tell, Google has all sorts of ways in which it has inserted contract clauses or otherwise wielded its power. Big picture, we know that spin-offs can be a really important part of this. In the ad network case, it's almost as if it's the equivalent if a large investment bank owned the New York Stock Exchange. That's how Google's ad business works, and search, it's a little bit different. So, what I'd like to see is really a hard look at spin-offs. Often spin-offs can create a lot of investor value and value to consumers and businesses, and I'd also like to see that any type of contractual clauses that are coercive are not able to be enforced by Google. This will help bring us back to an internet that was more open protocols where everyone can jump in.
Rohit, you cast the deciding vote to initiate this meta trial back when you were at the FTC. Do you believe that that meta was engaging in a buy or bury scheme? And what is your best estimation then of where this trial ends? If you think that that is how the court will decide meta has been handling things.
Well, that original vote was around five years ago, and that was after years of investigation. And what the investigation revealed was Facebook really was scrambling when mobile took off, and they saw Instagram and other apps really eating their lunch when it came to new ways to connect through mobile. And rather than actually devoting the money and expertise to innovate, they just bought those apps off, or if they wouldn't sell, um, they would use all sorts of mischief to make sure that they couldn't get traffic through Facebook. So to me, this is pretty off off the rails. We want technology companies to offer better and better services to consumers, to increase privacy protections, to not load their apps with scammy ads. And what we sometimes see is the big guys are threatened by the upstarts and they want to take them out. So that's what we're seeing and learning in this trial. We're even seeing in Mark Zuckerberg's own words, him being very clear in writing about this scheme. And so the trial will play out and I hope this is a signal to existing big tech companies that this type of conduct is illegal.
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