Google is a monopoly — and it’s crushing the internet

 

Five to 10 years ago, independent bloggers used to be able to get by on internet advertising, like the broadsheets of yore. But that changed quite quickly, and for two big reasons: Facebook and Google. They now gobble up the vast majority of internet advertising dollars — about 85 percent, as my colleague Jeff Spross writes — and a great many media outlets have been forced to move to direct subscriptions or other business models.

Google and Facebook manage this because they are platform monopolists. They can exert tremendous influence through their control of how people use the internet — and crush productive businesses in the process. Like any monopoly, it is long since time that the government regulated them to serve the public interest.

Google Allegedly Manipulating Search Results to Help Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

 

Tech giant Google is allegedly manipulating its online search results to bury terms that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, according to an analysis conducted by SourceFed, a news website with a prominent YouTube channel.

“SourceFed has discovered that Google has been actively altering search recommendations in favor of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, so quietly that we were unable to see it for what it was until today,” SourceFed’s Matt Lieberman said in a new video posted online Thursday.

Lieberman explained how, for example, if someone types “Hillary Clinton cri” into Google, the site’s auto-complete function, which provides the user search term suggestions while typing into the search bar, shows three potential searches: “Hillary Clinton crime reform,” “Hillary Clinton crisis,” and “Hillary Clinton crime bill 1994.” But when someone types “Hillary Clinton cri” into Yahoo’s search engine, the first search suggestion to appear is “Hillary Clinton criminal charges,” followed by “Hillary Clinton crimes” and “Hillary Clinton criminal.”