An antitrust case filed against Google by the U.S. Justice Department and state attorneys general, including Louisiana’s Jeff Landry, fails to address the best interests of consumers, a tech expert at the Pelican Institute said.
Landry and attorneys general from 10 other states joined a federal lawsuit in October that contends Google is engaging in monopolistic and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising internet markets.
“Google has grown into a big tech monopoly that has stifled competition,” Landry said in a prepared statement when the lawsuit was filed. “Without competition, we do not have capitalism; and without capitalism, we do not have America. So I am proud to join Attorney General Bill Barr in this fight for America.”
But Eric Peterson, director of the Center for Technology and Innovation Policy at the Pelican Institute in New Orleans, sees the lawsuit as not being based on what’s best for consumers. Instead, it attempts to rein in the power of technology companies perceived to be unfriendly to conservatives, he said.
“We’ve had antitrust laws on the books for over 100 years,” Peterson told the Louisiana Record. “It’s incumbent on the Department of Justice or state attorneys general to show in court that consumers are being harmed because of these sorts of actions. Without that, antitrust becomes a muddled mess, and the people of Louisiana or America are not seeing their needs put first.”
Although Google does enter into exclusivity agreements with producers of mobile devices so that they default to Google searches, Peterson noted that anyone can download other search engines, such as Bing or DuckDuckGo, to their cellphones. That hardly seems to hurt consumers, he said.
In addition, Google is subject to competition in product searches and those related to online advertising.
“Most product searches don’t necessarily start with Google,” he said. “They’re on products like Amazon or Etsy or Walmart.com.”
And over the past decade, online ads have declined in price by 40 percent during the alleged Google monopoly, according to Peterson, while the price of print ads and television ads have risen over the same period.
State and federal prosecutors should refrain from using antitrust law in a way that doesn’t benefit consumer welfare, he said. Such litigation can tie the hands of tech companies for years and costs them millions of dollars in legal fees, according to Peterson.
“Companies (may spend) time worrying about lawsuits and making decisions on that rather than competing and offering better products to consumers,” he said.
An op-ed Peterson recently authored pointed to how New York Attorney General Letitia James went down a similar road through meritless litigation filed against energy companies and the National Rifle Association.