Google is a predatory monopoly, so what are we going to do about it?

A 160-page document prepared by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2012 and leaked to The Wall Street Journal confirms a suspicion many of us have held for some time now: Google makes predatory use of its monopoly, providing search results aimed at damaging its competitors. What’s more, the FTC, instead of following the recommendations of its own staff to take legal action against the company, decided to do nothing other than imposing a few sanctions. In other words, it did nothing.

The leaked document shows that Google clearly to be guilty of all the practices of which it has been accused in recent years: scraping, or extracting information from competitors by taking advantage of its privileged position as the search engine used by competitors to open their content, artificially placing competitors’ results lower down in search results, putting its own services in more visible positions. These activities not only harmed its competitors to Google’s own benefit, but also failed its users by not offering search results based on relevance.

More alarming still is that with all this information in its possession, the FTC decided not to take action. It no longer matters if this was because of the company’s huge investment in lobbyists or its links to senior politicians, the point is that Google not only…