UPDATED 23:56 EST / MAY 21 2018

POLICY

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin questions Google’s power

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thinks Google Inc. might be too big for the good of society, echoing what other officials and businesses have been saying for some time.

In an interview with CNBC Monday, Mnuchin said the Department of Justice must look seriously at Google and other tech companies that have unprecedented power and a great impact on the economy. “I think that you have to look at the power they have,” he said, although he added that such scrutiny isn’t in his jurisdiction.

This comes on the back of a segment on “60 Minutes” called “How Did Google Get So Big?” In that show, antitrust lawyer Gary Reback said Google does indeed have a monopoly and that the company has a “mind-boggling degree of control over our entire society.”

In the interview Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder of Yelp Inc. described how Google is such a behemoth it’s difficult for any other business to compete. For years now Yelp has been a voice in the corner fighting against what it calls the Google monopoly.

“If you provide great content in one of these categories that is lucrative to Google, and seen as potentially threatening, they will snuff you out,” Stoppelman told 60 Minutes. “They will make you disappear. They will bury you.”

In 2017, Google was hit with a $2.9 billion fine from the European Commission for breaching antitrust rules, which Google challenged. On “60 Minutes,” the European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said that while she admires some of the things Google has done, she wants an end to the company’s untethered bullying.

“It’s very difficult to find the rivals,” she said. “Because on average, you’d find them only on page four in your search results.”

But it’s not only Google under the spotlight. Last month Makan Delrahim, the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said at a conference that large tech companies were engaging in the art of excluding the little man and gaining control over the market.

“Antitrust enforcers may need to take a close look to see whether competition is suffering and consumers are losing out on new innovations as a result of misdeeds by a monopoly incumbent,” said Delrahim.

Image: Images Money via Flickr

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