U.S. senators laid out a case for why Google is abusing the size of its online empire to harm competition and amass even more power, articulating arguments that could be central to the government’s upcoming antitrust case against the tech giant.
The Alphabet Inc. unit has clear dominance in the search, online video and advertising technology markets, and uses those positions to benefit the rest of its business, several senators from both sides of the aisle argued during a Tuesday hearing organized by a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary panel.
“You control YouTube and search, which are the dominant platforms; you control massive amounts of consumer data that you have harvested from your other consumer-facing platforms—Gmail, Google Maps, G Suite, etc.,” said Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri. “You then use those advantages in the ad stack at every single layer, every layer of which you exercise dominance in. This looks like monopoly upon monopoly in a classic case of tying.”