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Let me just read to you a summary of Google's current holdings. Google Alphabet owns YouTube, Android and Pixel phones, Waymo, which is a self-driving car project, Project Wing, which is a commercial drone delivery service. This is from a March 2021 Senate subcommittee hearing on competition policy, antitrust, and consumer rights. And the speaker is Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley.
The same Josh Hawley who objected to the presidential election results and raised his fist to protesters who gathered in front of the Capitol on January 6th. And here he is, ticking through the laundry list of Google's businesses. In other words, Alphabet Google owns a whole lot of stuff across a whole lot of industries. Here's my question to you. Is this a good idea? Is it a good idea to have one company competing in and indeed exercising dominant influence in multiple industries all at the same time?
Absolutely not. Okay, and this person essentially agreeing with Senator Hawley?
That's Barry Lynn. He's the executive director of the Open Markets Institute. And, I mean, you left off a few from that list. I did. Chrome, Maps, you know. And, you know, there is absolutely no reason, for instance, why YouTube needs to be connected to a mapping system. There is no reason for Chrome to be connected to cloud. The fact that Holly, an ardent conservative, and Lynn, a liberal think tank leader, are so aligned when it comes to Google is pretty striking.
And it says a lot about the conversation around big tech right now. Regulating giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook. This is one of the very few issues in the country that has bipartisan support, even if each side has different motivations. We're living in an unprecedented moment where Google is facing antitrust scrutiny at a level it just hasn't experienced before. Scrutiny of its size and the influence and power that come with it.
Which means we're living in a moment that could define the company, our economy, and our own daily lives for years to come.
Because billions of us use Google's products every day. Most of them are free. They work well. And to be honest, most of us probably aren't worrying about whether Google is a monopoly when we use it. But the case for regulating Google is a lot about the long-term impacts of its reach. The idea that we're giving something up. Maybe our individual privacy. Or on a larger scale, an economy that gives smaller players more of a chance.
Even some of Google's toughest critics acknowledge its technological excellence and the value of its tools. But the question is: should the government be checking Google's power? Or should we just leave it alone? And if we do regulate Google, how do we make sure that doesn't end up doing more harm than good?
So for this final episode of the season, we've gone to a set of politicians, scholars, and executives who've landed pretty strongly in their own answers to these questions. They all have different stakes in this fight, in whether or not to regulate Google. So they clearly have monopoly power. Because Google lacks competition, it can get away with abusing us by violating our privacy. So you kind of go around the
the internet and you see things that you already agree with because companies are showing you things based on this profile about you. It's an amazing leveler, an equalizer. Because of the advertising business model, poor people have access to exactly the same information as a rich person might. And I think that's really worth defending.
You're going to meet this cast of characters soon. But first, there's a story we've been waiting to tell you about the moment real antitrust scrutiny of Google began.
The story of DoubleClick, an online advertising company Google bought in 2007 for $3.1 billion in cash. DoubleClick made it official that Google, it wasn't just an online search company that sold ads. Google was an advertising giant that would underpin the business of the entire web. Which means that now you likely interact with DoubleClick just as often as you use Gmail, Search or YouTube, if not more often.
And though Google has renamed it, DoubleClick software is the tech that serves up many of the ads you see across the internet. DoubleClick is the invisible reason it's virtually impossible to get online now without dropping a coin into Google's pocket. It's been a few episodes since we've been in Google's early-ish world, the Google of 2007, when the company bought DoubleClick.
Back then, Google had basically just bought YouTube, and Android and Chrome were still about a year away from release. So remember the Google of episode two, the one in survivalist mode? That's the company that attorney Dana Wagner joined. He says Google approached him to establish the company's antitrust practice. And we should note up top, since Google was his client, that the company gave him permission to speak with us.
The first meeting I was in, first or second meeting with Larry and Sergey, there was a question about an aspect of the double-click deal. And someone said, OK, well, Dana will speak to that. And Larry said, who's Dana? And they said, oh, he's our new antitrust attorney. And he sort of shook his head and said, we have an antitrust attorney? It was a sea change. That would be something that Google would need full time. It's hard not to hear Larry as being out of touch with the reality of Google's situation here.
Even if Google was still in survivalist mode to its founders, by the time Wagner was sitting in that room with Larry Sergei, Google was already wildly profitable, with the world's leading search engine. But still, Wagner himself questioned his role. Remarkably, he wondered if he would even need to work full-time hours. Because in the simple year of 2007, Wagner said Google was more concerned with defending itself from other companies' anti-competitive behavior.
And one company loomed especially large. So much so that Wagner remembers a special codename task force inside Google that was built to keep an eye on the competing giant. I believe it was called Canada because, you know, Microsoft, our friendly neighbors to the north. Or not so friendly. Microsoft was known for flexing its power against its competitors. And for years, it had been embroiled in its own antitrust scrutiny. So to Google, Microsoft was the big bad tech monopoly.
And unlike Microsoft's products, Google's products were mostly free. Google had chosen to support its business through advertising rather than something like a subscription model for search or a lump fee for Gmail. And online advertising was a huge market. The web was where all our eyeballs went. It was valuable real estate.
So this is where DoubleClick comes in. DoubleClick was one of the most successful players in this booming market because the company aggressively took advantage of an opportunity to use technology to reinvent advertising. We're talking about the mid-90s or early 90s was the idea of an ad network where a single sales entity would sell ads across many websites. And that would be convenient for both sides. Our approach
Ari Paparo founded an online ad company called Beeswax. And back in 2007, he worked at DoubleClick. So he wasn't advertising when the internet transformed the industry. Before the web, if you were an advertiser, you basically knew where to go to sell your ads. There were just a handful of big TV networks, radio stations, and magazines. But then, when we all got online, suddenly there were hundreds of places you can put an ad.
And so the typical way of buying and selling ads in, let's say, TV, where you can do it over three martini lunches, doesn't scale very well because you'd be very drunk if you had to have those meetings with 50 different publishers. So DoubleClick did the job those martinis used to do. DoubleClick was software to connect advertisers and publishers and broker their deals.
It's a great business model because you can extract a pretty large margin on that business because really neither side could do it without you. The advertisers couldn't place their ads in that many sites and the publishers couldn't sell to that many advertisers. So it was a middleman position, but it's a very lucrative middleman. Or you take like 30% or something like that. Could be higher. It could be quite a bit higher in some cases.
Margins quite a bit higher meant that for each dollar spent on online advertising, a company like DoubleClick would cut off a sizable chunk before it ever reached the person who created the content the ad was appearing on. Like Papparo said, DoubleClick was in a lucrative position.
And it was poised to become part of a giant. My boss, a guy named Neil Mohan, he was in charge of selling the company. And he literally had a spreadsheet. And the name of the spreadsheet was Why Mag About XLS? Because there are only four people who could possibly buy this company. Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google. And what the spreadsheet said was, if you own DoubleClick, how much money will you make? And the answer was an enormous amount of money.
Oh, I don't know. I don't remember that. I'm not sure the bankers would have let me do that.
Neil Mohan, Paparo's then boss, is now a top executive at YouTube. You heard from him in episode three. He's one of the most important people inside Google, and he came to the company through DoubleClick. At the time of the acquisition, Mohan was DoubleClick's head of products. Even if Mohan doesn't remember that spreadsheet, he did say it's still possible it existed for internal use. So DoubleClick could make Google an enormous amount of money. But when I asked Mohan about the acquisition, he put DoubleClick's value into more googly terms than that. Yeah.
It was about creating opportunities for publishers of all sizes. Of course, Google had that heritage with search and DoubleClick really sort of fit into that heritage because, you know, coming from the DoubleClick side, that was also our mission, which is to enable publishers to be able to generate revenue to produce the content that they were producing, whether it was, you know, a large publisher, a small publisher. What Mohan is saying here, that was the premise of Google's DoubleClick acquisition.
and it's worth spelling out. The vision was, imagine the web is an untapped field of riches, a landscape with a wealth of oil bubbling beneath its surface. That oil is ad revenue. And in Google's vision, DoubleClick, under its control, would help everyone get a share of that oil.
Because Google would help connect publishers to advertisers. It would help the little guys make money, get in on the advertising business. And by letting everyone in on that business, Google said it would help the web flourish with more and more ad-supported content. Today, we're still wondering whether the open web is as equitable as Google said it could be. We'll get to that.
But there was another compelling reason for Google to buy DoubleClick: competition. The other companies on that spreadsheet, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft, if they bought DoubleClick, that could have been a real threat to Google's ads business. And vice versa. There was a bidding war for DoubleClick, especially between Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, and Google. The rumored price for the company was around $2 billion, a whole billion less than what Google would buy it for.
In April 2007, Google beat out its competition and bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, which meant Aria Paparo would soon be a Googler. Yes.
As soon as the acquisition closed, there was a feeding frenzy where a bunch of other acquisitions happened. So Microsoft, everyone panicked, basically, because if Google owns DoubleClick, how is anyone going to compete in advertising? So there was this sort of clearing the deck where everyone said, OK, the new world's emerged and we realize what it's going to look like. And holy cow, Google's going to win it unless we do something. Microsoft was so spooked it spent more than $6 billion on another online advertising company just a month later.
Microsoft and AT&T also sounded alarm about Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in the press, saying it would reduce competition on the open web. You could view this as being pretty rich coming from Microsoft, but one thing was clear. Google's acquisition left other tech and media giants sweating. Days after the DoubleClick deal was announced, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about it on stage at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Schmidt was in conversation with John Battelle, a journalist and author who helped launch Wired back in the 90s.
It's a gorgeous story, isn't it? That you have Microsoft and AT&T complaining in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal about Google and antitrust. I mean, it is sort of a beautiful... What's beautiful about this? Do you have a response? Yes, they're wrong. Come on, they're wrong. Give me a break. Okay.
There's a long list of reasons that they're wrong. Advertising is almost a trillion dollar business. The totality of what we're talking to here is about 1% of that. This is an emergent business with lots of different choices. Customers have lots-- and users have choices. Advertisers have choices. And these are people who were involved in the acquisition reviews, as best I can tell, who lost.
So basically, what Schmidt is saying is, no monopoly here with this Google deal. All those alarm bells, they're just getting rung by sore losers. He also repeats Google's premise for the deal, that this will mean a flourishing web filled with more choice, more content, for users, advertisers, and publishers. But it wasn't just Google's competitors who thought this deal might make Google too powerful. Unlike its YouTube buy, the DoubleClick acquisition did not sail through government inspection.
Which meant antitrust counsel Dana Wagner was finally very sure that he'd be working full-time hours. But even as it became clear that Google would have to defend its acquisition, Wagner remembers Larry and Sergey still didn't see their company as a giant worthy of that scrutiny.
And that was weird for them because they are true believers, right? They really believe that everything they're doing is valuable and a social good. And they weren't used to being on their back foot with criticisms of the behavior. There was always sort of a slight naivete about the role of the company in the world. And I actually found it to be inspiring and kind of touching.
Larry and Sergey really do want open competition, and they don't want people using their products who aren't freely choosing to do so. And they do think, rightfully, that they're investing huge amounts of resources into projects that are good for the world and probably collectively over the long term benefit them as a company economically. But they won't all do that. Wagner called this naive. I think that lets Larry and Sergey off a little easy. I would say, actually, they lacked a real self-awareness.
This kind of reminds me of the moment Larry Sergei left Stanford to start the company. Remember the way they talked about that decision? It wasn't like, "Oh, we're going to be millionaires." It was, "Hey, we have this idea that can make the internet better, the world better." And through that lens, it makes sense that Google's size and growing power in the industry, that just wouldn't seem like a bad thing to its founders.
The FTC ended up buying Google's defense of its DoubleClick acquisition. About a year after Google made the deal, it got officially approved in a 4-to-1 vote. Only one commissioner, a Democratic appointee named Pamela Jones-Harbour, voted against it. She was the only commissioner who objected to the clearance of the merger. And she did so largely on the basis that she thought the data accumulation and privacy concerns raised by the acquisition were things that the commission should be
looking at and taking a stand on before clearing this. One of the things that worried Harbour was how Google would use DoubleClick's data. DoubleClick was collecting information about you online whenever you visited a site with one of its ads. It could log that visit and create a sort of profile of your browsing history. And then, with that information, better decide what ads you should see.
So if Google owned DoubleClick, it could theoretically combine all that information with the other data Google collected about you and turn that into highly targeted advertising across its many products. For Harvard, the question was, could anyone compete with that, really? If you were an advertiser, why would you use anyone else's service that used less targeting data?
Harper's Worry would end up being pretty prescient. But back then, there just wasn't as much concern among users or regulators about digital privacy. And the question of whether anyone could really compete with Google? That's one we're still asking today. Because some of those who expected Google with DoubleClick to support a flourishing web, they've ended up pretty disappointed. Remember those margins DoubleClick charged its advertisers and publishers?
Google kept those margins pretty high. So, Google may have designed a system to redistribute some of the wealth of the internet, but not without a hefty tax. Now, the advertising market is dominated by two giants: Google and Facebook. Google is ahead. And both those giants, they're cashing in while everyone else is essentially scrambling to make money, including small businesses and even major publishers.
Journalism is just one of the industries that's been hit hard as Google and Facebook became brokers between publishers and advertisers and started taking a big cut of the money. And Google was able to grow so big in that critical market in part because this double-click deal went unchecked. But now, let's just say, people are checking.
When Elizabeth Warren ran for president, she actually called out the DoubleClick deal as something she'd want to unwind. And even Dana Wagner, the man who defended the deal for Google, he acknowledges the world is different now.
I think to a lot of people looking at the world and looking at the high levels of concentration across many industries in the United States, it's hard for them to look at that landscape and say, well, we have meaningful, robust antitrust enforcement that's protecting consumers because they're seeing all that consolidation. They're seeing the influence increasingly of a small number of companies. They don't feel like they have choices.
After the break, we'll focus on what's happening now in the battle between Google and regulators, and what that might mean for how Google affects our lives in ways both obvious and unseen.
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.
The sense that concentrated power in tech can have real consumer harm, it's been building for a long time. The European Union has been out ahead in trying to regulate big tech. And in the U.S., a small group of influential scholars have started what's been called the, quote, hipster antitrust movement, pushing for more aggressive action toward major companies.
But more recently, two forces really dialed up the intensity of antitrust sentiment in the U.S. The latest being the pandemic. This is Senator Amy Klobuchar in a March 2021 Senate subcommittee hearing. Markets aren't as competitive as they once were. And the devastating impact of COVID-19 on small and medium-sized businesses threatens to make things even worse. We have lost hundreds of thousands of small businesses.
As we went into lockdown and physically distanced ourselves, big tech kept us connected and provided much-needed services. Its power and size grew as a result. In 2020, the five largest tech companies gained nearly $3 trillion in market value.
Last year, Google's revenues went up almost 13% to over $182 billion, powered by growth in Google Search and YouTube ads. Even though Google's seen steady growth for years, something about it looks new against the backdrop of a global emergency, especially one that's heightened both our reliance on these companies and the inequality between the biggest tech giants and the rest of the economy. A second factor fueling interest in antitrust enforcement was the election of Donald Trump and the political climate it created.
During his administration, liberals saw tech and social media platforms as key players amplifying misinformation and radicalizing users. And conservatives saw them as restricting speech. Here's Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah at the March Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee hearing. When conservatives are deplatformed, we're often told, look, if you don't like it, you can go out and build your own. But the if you don't like it, go build your own argument lost a lot of steam recently.
Parler tried. And what happened? Well, Apple and Google and Amazon all teamed up to just kick Parler off the internet. So we've got officials on opposite sides of the aisle, united in their discomfort with the feeling of Google's dominance. And the source of that discomfort comes down to choice, which has a couple dimensions to it, actually.
One of those dimensions has to do with privacy and whether Google offers its users enough of a choice when it comes to how much of their personal data they give away when they use Google's products. This is essentially the issue that inspired Gabriel Weinberg to start his company in 2008. A search engine called DuckDuckGo.
Just to give you some sense of scale, we do about 100 million queries a day, which is about 2.5 billion a month. Which makes him a direct competitor to Google, but a very small one. How small exactly? Weinberg's not sure. We don't track our users, so we don't know the exact amount. That's one of the big selling points of the DuckDuckGo search engine. It doesn't know very much about who uses it.
But now if you're thinking, why would someone try to take on Google's core business? You're not alone. Other people definitely thought I was crazy. But Weinberg had a feeling that there was a need for a better search engine and a real opportunity. That period was, that was the period where Google started to veer, in my opinion, which is why I got into it, away from the user experience.
Thinking about user first and thinking about other things. Things like how to turn all the data Google scooped up every time you used its products into revenue. So Google's business model, for example, is behavioral advertising. So to collect...
as much information as they can on you to target you across the internet. This is that type of advertising Commissioner Pamela Jones-Harbour was worried about when she voted against a DoubleClick acquisition. Just as she predicted, Google became really, really good at targeting ads. And over time, in Weinberg's view, privacy sometimes took a backseat to profits. So way back in 2012, they changed their privacy policy
to allow for data sharing between their business units and started accelerating the idea that you would use your search history, which had been sacred in Google, even inside Google, for other things. - This was a big deal. Before 2012, your Google search history was separated from your YouTube data, your Gmail, your Google Maps inquiries, and your Chrome browser history. Now, Google was going to allow these services to share their data.
In announcing the policy change, Google wrote, quote, "In short, we'll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience." If you've ever had your Google Calendar automatically add a flight that you just got a confirmation email for, or if searches on your phone are targeted to your location, that's Google taking all the information it knows about you and using it to better intuit what you need. It can make life easier. And this goes back to the idea that Sergey had in our Google Glass episode.
My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all. You would just have information come to you as you needed it. But that vision, where Google knows so much about you, that information you just want, appears? These days, we're a lot more aware of the privacy concessions we'd have to make to get anywhere near that reality.
Google's critics are asking, is it really such a good idea for so many of us to be giving so much of ourselves away to one company? These kinds of questions aren't news to Google. It's well aware that privacy is one of the biggest concerns for users, especially how the company monetizes our data through advertising. We spoke to Adam Cohen, Google's Director of Economic Policy, who defended its approach.
So we want advertising to succeed. Advertising helps fund a free and open web and it delivers enormous benefits to businesses and consumers. But we also need to ensure that advertising and privacy aren't at odds with each other.
To Google, behavioral ads are another boon to your experience online. Because since those ads are based on your browsing history, they're theoretically tuned into what you actually want and need. So you get relevant marketing, the site you're on gets revenue, and the advertiser, they might even score a new customer. And the key question in my mind there is whether or not privacy and security can be maintained.
And in Cohen's view, Google's doing a good job maintaining that balance. But even while highlighting the benefits of using data to target ads, he recognizes that many users worry about whether they're being watched online. We've heard from consumers that they don't like advertisements that track them across the web. And we've heard from regulators that this is an area that they think is problematic.
On March 3rd, 2021, Google announced that it was no longer going to sell ads based on an individual's browsing history around the web. Instead, it has said it'll use advancements in AI to be able to show you relevant ads without having to know your personally identifiable information.
But this isn't the end of the privacy issue by any means, because this new policy only applies to certain types of data and doesn't extend to apps on our phones, which is how we're all increasingly interacting with the internet. And the idea that AI will solve the problem of privacy? Well, we've seen in the last episode that AI has its own host of challenges. At the end of the day, Google will still have a lot of information about you, and it's really, really good at using it.
Look, I mean, I think Google is doing about as well as you can to be transparent about its practices. But with all of these companies, if you disagree with their practices with the data, it is becoming difficult as a practical matter to opt out. That's Dana Wagner again, Google's former antitrust attorney. He pointed out that Google does build tools to make it easier for people to view and control the data that it collects on them.
Like, he remembered the company put a team of its smartest engineers to work on something called the Google Data Liberation Front. So Google's commitment to data transparency, it isn't all talk in his view. But that doesn't change the fact that Google and big tech can still feel inescapable. Even Dana Wagner understands that, and he thinks about it through the lens of his current job as the chief legal officer for Impossible Foods. Look, I work for a company that makes food.
vegan meat from plants. I'm an animal lover. I'm an environmentalist. I want to reduce my dependence on industrial animal agriculture. I'm sure there's leather in my shoes. It would be hard for me to buy clothing that didn't have any questionable labor practice and stuff.
And I think the online world is a little bit like that with data and privacy now. That it's just, it's hard to go about in the world and, you know, interact with your employer and be able to have communication with your friends through normal channels and stay in touch with your family and, you know, grow a business by having that. And not be, you can't really opt out of all these systems to the same extent. Wagner is bringing us to another point of antitrust concern around Google. The second part of our question of choice.
If we decide we're not totally comfortable with Google having our data, what does it mean to really opt out of using its products? How easy is it to not choose Google?
Some advocates for stronger antitrust action against big tech have been raising these questions for years. Like Sally Hubbard. Hubbard is the director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute and the author of the book Monopoly Suck. Look, I have been trying to get more aggressive antitrust enforcement against the tech platforms since 2016. And in 2016, no one wanted to hear what I had to say.
These were still America's darling companies, our unicorns, our superstars. But of course, now more people are listening. And something they're talking about is the power of the default. You heard a lot about this power in our second episode. Remember when it was such a threat to Google that Microsoft might make its own search the default for Internet Explorer?
Now many of Google's critics, including Hubbard, argue that Google is protecting its dominance in search through similar means. Like the fact that Google is paying Apple somewhere between $8 and $12 billion a year to make Google search the default search engine on all Apple devices. This revelation came out last October when the Department of Justice filed its antitrust suit against Google, which alleges a wide range of anti-competitive actions in search and search advertising.
Google's response is that the deal with Apple is promotional. Here's Adam Cohen again. Well, we want to compete for customers. We want people to see our products. It's not dissimilar from the way a well-known brand like Coca-Cola or Kellogg's might reach an agreement with a supermarket for eye-level shelf space on internet.
in those supermarkets. Yeah, they might be successful, but they want to continue to advertise themselves so that they can continue to be successful and continue to promote the quality of their products and services. It's the same for us. Not everyone's buying that argument. Here's Sally Hubbard.
So obviously defaults matter, or Google wouldn't be willing to fork over that much money to make sure that it was the default. I know people just tend to go with what comes on their devices. More savvy people may shop around, but the average consumer does tend to go with what's the default on their device.
When you look at the numbers today, Google is by far the king of search. Around 90% of all search queries happen on Google. But the way Cohen puts it, Google has plenty more competition if you expand your definition of what search really is. I think the other thing that's really important to understand about search is that it isn't just Bing and Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. This is a much wider market than that. For example, if you're shopping for a new product, you're more likely to start searching on Amazon, not Google.
And if you're looking for news about your friends, you're more likely to start your search on, say, Facebook. Cohen says consumers have options and they know how to use them. One good indicator of this is if you look at Microsoft devices, they come with Microsoft's
Edge browser pre-installed and Microsoft Bing, their search service pre-installed. But Google Chrome, our browser, is the most used browser on those devices. People are downloading Google Chrome and choosing to use it. Similarly, in Microsoft Bing, the number one search query on Bing globally is Google. So people know how to exercise choice online and they do this actively if they're not finding the products and services that they want.
Cohn is echoing a popular mantra that Google has used to defend its size: competition is just a click away. He's saying people can choose Google if they like it better, or Bing, and what they end up going with is what they really prefer. To be fair, though, it's often more than one click. To change the default search on your iPhone, for example, you have to go into Settings, then click into your Safari settings specifically, and then you can reset your default. It makes sense to me that so many people really do prefer Google.
But we also have to acknowledge that may be because it's the biggest, and Google has been able to build great products in part because of its size. So even if competition like DuckDuckGo is a click away, for some users, it's just not worth the effort to switch. Which DuckDuckGo's Gabriel Weinberg is painfully aware of. Obviously, we're pretty big, but we're not that big, right? And so what's the delta here?
To us, it's Google's anti-competitive tactics. So, you know, 100 million people have found us, but we think we'd be much bigger if it was kind of easier to switch effectively. For Sally Hubbard, Google's actions are textbook monopolistic maneuvers. What they should do is compete based on merit by innovating and offering the best products and services. And in many respects, Google has done that. But what Google also has done is
is made sure that no other company could even get an opportunity to compete against them. And that's one of the main allegations in the DOJ's case, for example, is that Google, ironically, has not done exactly what Microsoft did. With its monopoly power on the Android operating system,
Google said to phone makers, just like Microsoft had said to computer makers, you're going to install our apps as the default. So that's the problem. Antitrust laws basically demand that companies compete by offering superior products and services and not by using their muscle to kick out competitors.
There's another dimension to this, to what critics view as Google muscling out competitors, and what Google says is just delivering a better product. And this has to do less with what search engine you use, but when you're actually on Google, what search results you get. Google's been accused of scraping useful information from other companies' websites and displaying it on its own search page.
You know when you look up lyrics to a song on Google, how those lyrics just pop up? You don't have to click out of search? Critics argue that's a blow to the site that provides those lyrics, because you may never actually go to that site, in which case it wouldn't get to show you its ads. A July 2020 investigation by The Markup found that many Google searches just let users write back to Google.
Specifically, 41% of the first page of a Google search on a mobile phone was taken up by Google products. Like ads, so-called knowledge panels, like the little panel that would show you those lyrics, and related searches. Google has said, like it does on the privacy question, that this is for the user's benefit. Google is finding what users are looking for faster, and it isn't making money from stuff like song lyrics or recipes. Gabriel Weinberg has seen DuckDuckGo grow significantly over the past year.
That 100 million daily searches is twice the number of the year before. We're starting to get big because just the user base has gotten big. But it takes, you know, offline conversations to explain these things to people and really kind of get it, so to speak. And that would just take time. The final thing I'd say is we're not trying to take over the world. I mean, we are trying to be an option for people who want privacy. We think that most people want it.
Compared to Larry Sergei in their founders' days, with their grandiose vision of trying to organize all the world's information, it strikes me how much narrower Weinberg says his ambitions are here. It's like he's banking on that appeal of the narrowness, that this company isn't after world domination. But in a way, one of the strongest rationales for breaking up Google is that we need more people like Larry Sergei, chasing that dream of conquering the toughest problems in tech.
I think what we really want is more technology companies, a marketplace that's working properly and has real competition. That's Representative David Cicilline, Democrat from Rhode Island. He's chair of the powerful House Antitrust Subcommittee and someone who The New York Times wrote may be big tech's biggest threat.
Last year, the subcommittee put out a 300-plus page report about big tech, concluding that Google, along with the other major tech giants Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, were all engaged in anti-competitive behavior. I asked Cicilline why he spent the past several years digging into tech regulation, a messy and complicated topic.
So the next great idea, the next great entrepreneur can develop a company and actually enter the marketplace and compete successfully. We want more of that, not less of it. When you hear these stories of small businesses that come up with these great new ideas and then just get crushed because there's a change of an algorithm, because they're excluded in some way, because their services or products are replicated or stolen by these platforms, it's heartbreaking. And we've got to do something about it.
Cicilline is referring to a widespread criticism of big tech, a strategy nicknamed copy-acquire-kill. What that means is, if a company has an innovative product or a feature that threatens a tech giant's business, the giant will either copy the idea or acquire the company and build it up in its own empire. Or just shut it down. Over the years, Google has acquired and shut down numerous competitors and startups. There's even a website, one of my favorites, called Killed by Google, that keeps track of all the products that the company has gotten rid of.
Some probably deserved it, but who knows if some great ideas were killed because they just were too niche or unuseful for a trillion-dollar company. Cicilline and A.B. Klobuchar are going to lead the antitrust conversation for a Congress that's eager to take on the issue. Klobuchar has introduced legislation to beef up antitrust laws and government enforcement and make it harder for major tech companies to buy their competition.
Both are also co-sponsoring legislation that would allow newspapers to collectively bargain with Google and Facebook over ad revenues on their sites. And as Cicilline confirmed in her interview, there's a set of even more drastic regulation, quote, absolutely on the table. Structural separation. Structural separation would rock Google or any of the tech giants because it would essentially mean breaking them up. For Google, that could mean separating its search and ads business.
Elizabeth Warren has already taken a stab at outlining how this could work, and if enough other legislators could get on board, I mean, it might be a stretch, but this could become a reality. But many would say that breaking up Google is not without risk to its users. We asked Marissa Meyer about the criticism that Google's too big. She's the early Google executive and former Yahoo CEO you heard from in our first episode on the origin story of Don't Be Evil.
It's not obvious sometimes from the outside, but you say, well, there's search and there's maps. Like, aren't they just two different things? But actually understanding maps well makes your search better and understanding search well makes your maps better. And even if you say, well, look, there's the advertising side of the business and there's the search side of the business. Well, you can't have one without the other.
Right. And in many ways, our ads and one of the reasons that Google's ads have been so successful is because they're paid results. But in and of themselves, they aren't terrible answers to the questions that are being asked through search. They actually make, in many cases, the search experience better. Google is also spending lots of money on lobbyists, think tanks and academics themselves, in part to convince lawmakers of this argument.
But not all Googlers are wary of the idea that their own company should be broken up. And this is fascinating. In the run-up to the 2020 election, I did a story with Ronnie Mola, co-host of our Netflix season, about how Googlers were reacting to the increased focus on breaking up big tech. According to FEC records, Googlers donated the most to Warren and Sanders' primary campaigns in the first six months of 2019.
When I asked Googlers why they were in favor of politicians who wanted to potentially financially harm their own employer, they gave me surprising answers. They thought breaking up Google was the right thing to do for the economy at large and could be good for Google's own business because they thought it could force Google to return to its startup roots, recapture that bootstrapped work culture, and ultimately spur innovation.
But some other Google employees, and especially executives, say that there's a major risk in going too far with regulation. That the wrong move could stymie not just Google, but the entire tech industry, a part of the U.S. economy that's growing, creating jobs and homegrown products that are used and sold around the world.
Here's Adam Cohen again. "Google last year invested almost $28 billion in research and development. That's more than the annual budget for NASA. That gives you a good sense that we're not resting on our laurels and that we're not letting past success make us comfortable that we're going to continue to be successful in the future." What Cohen's saying is that Google's massive research dollars fund innovation that can benefit all of us, and regulation could mess that up.
But it's hard to test that claim without knowing what regulation would look like. This is about saving capitalism and building an economy that works for all Americans. It's about laws that throughout our history have rejuvenated capitalism. The breakup of the rail trust, the breakup of Standard Oil, to the breakup of AT&T. This is the battle of a century and it feels like every century we take on these laws in a big way. And this is our moment.
I think it's worth saying here that though of course Google had a strong hand in building its own dominance, the system it grew in plays a role too. In our modern economy, the winners take all and the losers go home.
We've talked a lot about how virtually every major decision Google made, it made in part because otherwise it wouldn't survive. That's because Google grew in an economy that, in a way, incentivizes bigness, demands it. It may have been difficult for Google to survive without becoming a monopolist in the process. So in this moment we're in with regulation, this isn't just a moment of potential change for Google.
It's one that could address issues with the system that Congress and regulators have themselves shaped. As we put together this episode, we kept coming back to a certain image. From 2004, when Larry and Sergey gave a TED Talk called The Genesis of Google. It was just a few months before the company's IPO. And so Google was, to use Sally Hubbard's word, a darling of Silicon Valley.
Sergey started the talk by projecting an image of the globe onto a screen behind him. It looked like the Earth lit up at night, with colored dots all over the continents. This is what we run at the office that actually runs real time. Each dot, Sergey said, represented about 20 to 30 Google searches. But here you can see around the world how people are using Google. So you can see here we are in the U.S., and they're all coming up red. There we are in Monterey. Hopefully I can get it right.
he started to spin the world around to show that Google was everywhere. - You can see that Japan is busy at night. There's a lot of activity in China. There's a lot of activity in India. And Europe, which is right now in the middle of the day, is going really strong with a whole wide variety of languages.
Even in Antarctica, at least this time of year, from time to time we'll see a query rising up. There was even Google orbiting around the world. And if we had it plotted correctly, I think the International Space Station would have it too. This image, it sort of tells the whole story of Google. The company that started with an ambition to serve the world's better information and succeeded. Everywhere, around the world, wherever there's internet, there's Google.
But now, watching Sergey spin the world around, pointing to Google's reach, the company's mission hits a little differently. I think it's really telling though that one of the strongest arguments for regulating Google is that we need to do so for the next Google to succeed. Because implicit in that is a recognition that Google did really change the world, for good. So there's something about Google that's worth preserving or replicating. Which is a sense you get even from the employee activism we talked about. That there's something inside Google worth fighting for.
I'm really struck at the end of this season by how Google's idealistic origins have always been in tension with the reality of its own ambitions and where it's ended up as a company of immense size and power. Google has never really stopped seeing itself as idealistic, as different from other big tech companies. You heard that from Sundar Pichai's comments in our episode about Google's culture.
But now, with potential regulation, Google is being forced to recognize its own strength head on. And it's going to have to redefine its identity and goals in a new way that we as a society accept while it continues moving forward as a business. The stakes are high for Google to get that right. Because we need Google, but now Google needs us and our trust, too. Land of the Giants: The Google Empire is a production of Recode by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Special thanks to Adam Clark-Estes for his editing help on our final couple episodes. Also, special thanks to Peter Kofka, Dieter Bohn, Julia Furlan, Charlie Herman, Cynthia Betubiza, Brandon Santos, and Lauren Katz. Megan Cunane is the show's lead producer. Lissa Soap is our editor. And a note, she just joined the team working on Language Please, a Vox Media project that received funding from the Google News Initiative. Nathan Cunane is the show's lead producer.
Nathan Miller is our associate producer and engineer this episode. Emily Sen is our fact checker. Our theme song was composed by Gautam Shrikashen. Sam Holtman is Recode's editor-in-chief. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Kantrowitz. Big thanks to Recode for inviting me to be part of the series, which I was a fan of as a listener before joining as a co-host. And I hope you and I can continue our conversation.
You can join me every Wednesday for my weekly interview series, Big Technology Podcast, on your favorite podcast app. And I'm Shereen Ghaffari. If you're craving more stories about the other tech giants, you can listen to our past seasons on Amazon and Netflix. And you can follow my work more on Vox and Recode. Thanks so much for listening to this series.