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In my work, I often get the question: can governments really do anything to limit the power of big tech? A recent US district court ruling, which found Google breached antitrust laws, is an opportune time to revisit the issue.
I argue that governments need to approach technology problems – such as national security threats, non-competitive behaviour, social harms, data breaches or digital service standards – as individual issues, rather than focusing on the behaviour of companies and individuals.
Governments need to unite to rebalance their relative power and focus on enforcing existing legislation. That is happening, slowly. This latest ruling is the first major decision in one of several US-government led competition lawsuits targeting big tech.
On 5 August, the US court found that Google is a monopoly and that it had acted in non-competitive ways to maintain this monopoly. The judgment bears resemblance to a landmark Microsoft case from 25 years ago. It centres around Google’s monopoly in search and text advertising and highlights how Google pays billions (largely to Apple and Samsung) for exclusive default search distribution on phones and browsers.
You probably didn’t need a judge to tell you that Google built an internet search empire. In Australia, Google’s market share of search on mobile has remained around 98 per cent from 2021 to 2024 and globally its above 90%.
Notwithstanding an appeal, this US case could have major implications internationally. Already in Australia the competition regulator has this year revealed that Google had undertaken similar practices, and that it had accepted undertakings from telecommunications companies Telstra, Optus and TPG not to renew or enter any such default browser agreements with Google regarding Android devices.
The Google case has released thousands of pages of internal documentation which shine a light on the extent of surveillance Google has – and wants.
Any government’s ability to reign in big tech is constrained given the global nature of the services. But the effort is growing, evident in the recent stoush in legal action against X over footage of an assault in Sydney, and various comments from the Prime Minister down such as calling Elon Musk an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he's above the law”. In the UK, social media companies have been blamed in recent days for the spread of material that fuelled violent riots.
While these kinds of statements are political winners, lending support to popular views, they come without real ramifications for technology companies. So, it’s instead important to look at action.
Civil cases over the protection of personal information are afoot. In July, the Australian government also introduced a bill to impose a minimum tax on multinationals, as well as a Technology Foreign Interference Taskforce.
At the AUSMIN talks last week, Australia and the United States signed an agreement on Countering Foreign State Information Manipulation. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has expansive powers to protect Australians from online harm and is continually at the forefront of regulatory action.
These cases also release important internal evidence into the public domain. In the US, the Google case has released thousands of pages of internal documentation which shine a light on the extent of surveillance Google has – and wants. It shows how Google views privacy, seeks to maintain its monopoly in search and advertising, looks at subscription models (like news) as a business model constraint, and sees privacy protections as a competitive threat. This information will help regulators globally.
The documents are also helping to match internal policy changes with public impact, using Google’s own views, strategies and data. In 2016, Google changed a single line in its privacy policy which resulted in the most significant boost to its surveillance machine in a decade. This happened by merging users’ anonymous browsing with personally identifiable information and search activity, creating a single profile/cookie across ads and user accounts. The project was apparently named internally “Narnia 2”.
We’ve seen big tech dominance in almost every way imaginable, across search, social media and digital platforms, to how we are identified and tracked online, with data broking, intelligence and surveillance. Big tech can even influence a state’s ability to wage war and how services are accessed during conflict.
If you’re hopeful the Google case will be the start of breaking up big tech companies, you’ll be disappointed. If the case withstands appeal, it seems likely the method of paying for exclusive distribution will change. In the short term this could help Google, given its search engine popularity and superiority. However, with data the name of the game, significantly reducing any one entity’s access to personal, behavioural and financial information along with browsing history will curtail parts of the big tech business model over time.
I’m mostly optimistic about our ability to regulate when technologies present significant social harms and security threats. Time is of the essence though. I hope this case – as with the CrowdStrike outage – highlights the need to standardise the supply of digital services. I am most worried about the less visible forms of discrimination, the resilience of our information ecosystem as well insidious uses of social media from algorithmic curation to mis- and disinformation and foreign interference.
