The Antitrust Investigation into Google: Why I’m paying attention to it and you should too.

America, despite all their differences in other issues, can agree on this: Google is not playing fair. That’s why 50 attorneys general from US states and territories, are putting their differences on political ideologies aside, and opening an antitrust investigation into Google, specifically into their advertising practices and search engine model.

Imagine if Google owned your house. If you wanted to sell your house, the only way to do that is via Google, and the only buyer is through Google too. Would you get the best and fairest prices for your property?

The problem is not that Google has majority share of the search engine market. The problem is that the state of search and advertising on the world’s biggest search engine is not a level playing field when Google stopped serving the users that it’s supposed to serve — the advertisers, the businesses and the users.

If the above doesn’t convince you, here are 3 reasons why I’m paying massive attention to what’s happening right now.

1. It’s been 21 years since the last major monopolization case.

There has not been a major monopolization case since 1998 when Microsoft was sued. It’s been 21 years since then. This is major sign that the US government is serious about taking on Big Tech.

Antitrust regulations exist to prevent businesses from holding too much centralized power over an industry. Legislators at state and federal levels can take action to promote competition by preventing mergers, breaking up big companies, and penalizing companies for anti-competitive behavior with fines.

2. The basic business model of the world’s largest technology firms is being threatened.

Improved data practices and operations are the fundamental basics of a tech company for growth. Compliance is not optional any more.

The attorneys general are saying that they have seen evidence of Google’s business practices undermining consumer choice, stifling innovation, violating users’ privacy, and putting Google in control of the flow and dissemination of online information.

Google basically owns the search engine market at 90% market share with 74.6% of U.S. search ad spending. They dominate all aspects of search advertising, inserting themselves into every level — the buy side, supply side, and auctioning of ads. Google wields way too much power in setting rates and favouring their own services over others.

3. Good news for industries who have been affected by Google’s practices

If you search for jobs (try ‘UI/UX Jobs’), or hotels (try ‘Hotels in Bangkok’), you’ll find Google has their own widgets which competes with sites like Indeed, or Agoda which aggregates these listings. Why does Google need to compete with the websites that list on the search engine under the guise of better usability?

TripAdvisor and Booking.com have previously raised complaints of Google pushing their own products on user’s search engine results around travel related products, decelerating their own traffic via Google’s search engines while increasing costs per customer from search. They’re turning their spending towards traditional mediums of TV & Radio to get users to go directly to their sites instead of relying on search, and these are only the news about bigger travel companies. There’s definitely more unreported news about smaller businesses who are affected.

This investigation is a great first step for people who have been very frustrated by Alphabet — YouTube, Google and it’s subsidiaries.

As Google, Facebook and many other Big Tech companies are American, it’s high time the US government went beyond partisan interests to challenge Big Tech companies for the greater good. Our privacy is at risk. The way the world’s data are being handled and how we get access to information, is at risk.

I hope for a fair and thorough investigation into Google’s stranglehold on the internet. I truly believe that it’s time for search to go back to the way it’s supposed to be, where results displayed are the best results for the user looking for something.

That’s why we built Boogle, so that we can return search results to the state where organic results (as opposed to ads) are shown will be the one that is the best for users instead of those that are promoted by the search engine company itself.

Boogle is also building an advertising product on top of Boogle Search to make advertising cheaper and more transparent for businesses and advertisers. We already have 4 million user sign ups and our users are early adopters of technology.

Boogle will change how ads are delivered on a search engine, lowering costs and being more transparent to advertisers. I’m excited to reveal this to the world soon.

Follow more of our CEO’s thoughts on his LinkedIn.

Try out Boogle.com, the first decentralized search engine built on blockchain where you can earn as you search, and no single entity owns or acts on your data without your permission.