DOJ Seriously Coming After Google

If I were Don’t Be Evil, Inc, I would be worried.

While the Democrats are obsessed with intimidating Facebook into censoring conservatives while spreading nonsense and lies about foreign interference, AG Barr has been keeping his eye on the ball. Google controls internet search and it’s transformed from some libertarian tendencies to a radical leftist indoctrination factory. Meanwhile Google has been making a mockery of anti-trust law.

And the DOJ is focusing in on Google’s profit center, advertising, and where its anti-trust violations are at their most blatant.

The Justice Department has reached out to more than a dozen companies in its antitrust probe of Google, including publishers, advertising technology firms and advertising agencies, as the company’s online ad tools become a major focus of the investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.
In recent months, the department has been posing increasingly detailed questions—to Google’s rivals and executives inside the company itself—about how Google’s third-party advertising business interacts with publishers and advertisers, the people say. That digital business was built largely on the company’s 2008 acquisition of the ad-technology firm DoubleClick.

Which was itself illegal and arguably the basis for Google’s money machine. But until now, no one was willing to hold Google’s feet to the fire.

Google’s ad-tech business consists of software used to buy and sell ads on sites across the web. The company owns the dominant tool at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers, giving it unique power over the monetization of digital content. Many publishers and advertising rivals have charged that it has tied these tools together—and to its owned-and-operated properties like search and YouTube—in anticompetitive ways.
Meanwhile, state attorneys general who are pursuing their own Google investigation met Tuesday with Justice Department officials, a potential step toward closer coordination of the two probes. The state officials sent out a subpoena to Google in the fall that was dominated by questions about the inner workings of its ad-tech products.

Googlers were weeping after Trump won last time. If he wins again, they’ll really have something to cry about.