Aurich Lawson
Google’s story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth. The once-beloved startup—with its unofficial “Don’t Be Evil” motto—has instead become a major Internet monopolist, as a federal judge ruled on Monday, dominating the market for online search. Google is also well-known for its data-harvesting practices, for constantly killing off products, and for facilitating the rise of brain-cell-destroying YouTubers who make me Fear for Today’s Youth. (Maybe that last one is just me?)
Google’s rapid rise from “scrappy search engine with doodles” to “dystopic mega-corporation” has been remarkable in many ways, especially when you consider just how much goodwill the company squandered so quickly. Along the way, though, Google has achieved one unexpected result: In a divided America, it offers just about everyone something to hate.
Here are just a few of the players hating Google today.
Conservative attorneys general. Google used to be considered a left-wing darling, especially among the technocrats staffing the Obama administration. Conservatives, watching the liberal lovefest, soured on Google (and many other Big Tech firms), making lots of noise about “censorship” and bias. Attorneys general, often from more conservative states, began aggressively going after Google on everything from movie piracy to Mississippi student data to “lying to Texans.”
All attorneys general. But as discomfort with Google’s size and tactics spread, so did opposition to the company. Soon it was all state AGs suing Google for running its Android Play Store as a monopoly. Last year, Google agreed to pay $700 million to end that case.
Epic Games. Private companies like Epic Games got in on the antitrust action, too. Last year, lawyers for Epic Games convinced a federal jury that Google had an illegal monopoly on Android app distribution and in-app charges. (Epic has gone after Apple for similar issues with its App Store.)
Conservative state legislatures. Under the Trump administration, complaints about the “censorship” of conservative content ramped up, especially around YouTube. Conservative state legislatures, including Texas and Florida, soon started passing laws designed to prevent Google and the big social media companies from exercising viewpoint discrimination. The laws were immediately caught up in litigation that continues to this day, but in July 2024, the Supreme Court ruled against them. Singling out the Texas law, the Supreme Court majority agreed that “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others.”
Donald Trump, personally. Trump appears to harbor a more personal antipathy toward Google, convinced that the company is somehow screwing him when it comes to search results.
Last week, Trump went on TV and launched into a rant against Google, saying:
Google, nobody called from Google. One of the things like doing a show like yours, your show, you know, you see it on Fox, but when you really see it is all over the place, they take clips of your show that you’re doing right now with me and if I do a good job, they’re gonna vote for me, they’re gonna vote for me because it’s not just on Fox, it’s on Fox is a smaller part of it. You’re on all over this, those little beautiful cell phones you’re on, you’re all over the place. You have a product, you have a great product. You have a great brand. So you have to get out, you have to get out, you have to do things like your show and other shows and Google has been very bad. They’ve been very irresponsible and I have a feeling that Google is gonna be close to shut down.
The Kamala Harris campaign called this an “unintelligible rant,” but the point is clear enough: Google bad!
Trump also appears convinced that Google is purposely messing with its search autocomplete to block news about his assassination attempt. On July 30, an AP article fact-checked his claim that “attempted assassination of tr” did not bring up Trump’s name but did bring up Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, and “president donald duck.”
According to the AP, “Multiple high-profile figures, including Trump and sitting members of Congress, promoted the claim across social media platforms, collectively amassing more than 1 million likes and shares.” Google denied that any “manual action” was taken and said that the results were caused by protections against political violence.
On August 5, 2024, Trump asked his supporters to stop using Google.
The Trump + Biden Departments of Justice. As Trump’s presidential term came to an end, the Department of Justice filed a major antitrust suit against Google, claiming the company had a monopoly in search. The complaint opened this way:
Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is long gone. The Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet, and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet, with a market value of $1 trillion and annual revenue exceeding $160 billion. For many years, Google has used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising—the cornerstones of its empire.
At the time, Democratic skepticism of Big Tech was rising due to specific issues (the hellscape that social media had become, online disinformation after COVID-19, screen time concerns, etc.) but also to a broader feeling that pro-worker policies and old-fashioned trustbusting were just the thing after many years of corporate consolidation. So when the Biden administration took power, it maintained the case against Google and won it yesterday.