A federal judge recently ruled that Google was operating an illegal monopoly by forcing its search engine on internet users. But that’s just the first part of the case – the courts will now have to decide what punishment to hand down. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A federal judge recently ruled that Google was operating an illegal monopoly by forcing its search engines on internet users. But that’s just the first part of the case. The courts will now have to decide what punishment to hand down. The punishment to hand down in my mind is easy. Break the son of a up. Okay. They’re just too big. It’s almost laughable. You can’t even, if you do a search on your telephone whether it’s Android, first thing that’s gonna pop up is Google. It’s almost like these other companies don’t even exist, Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, or Ecosia, it’s like they don’t exist. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And Google has become obviously so popular over the last couple decades that Google something is now synonymous with search for it.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. You don’t hear Bing something or DuckDuckGo something.
Farron Cousins: But what gets me about this, just to kind of break it down so people understand what’s really at the heart of this Monopoly case, is picture a movie theater. A movie theater can run whatever movie they want to run, but then you have a movie studio that goes to these theaters and says, hey, I’ll pay you tens of millions of dollars if you only show movies from our studio. So you’re not gonna show Disney movies, you’re not gonna show Universal. You’re only gonna show Warner Brothers movies. That’s what Google essentially did according to this case here. They went to Apple, they went to Android, they went to, obviously the phones that they own, and they said, we will give you tens of millions of dollars to make Google your default search engine. That’s what’s part of this.
Mike Papantonio: Well, isn’t that capitalism though? I mean, isn’t that? You know, you hear the term end of time capitalism, it almost sounds like the guy, it’s the golden rule. Who has the gold? They’re gonna make all the rules. And that’s what Google’s been doing. An emerging company stands very little chance. And that’s the whole policy, isn’t it, behind antitrust and monopoly? To be able to say that there are very variations of creativity at all levels and when you have somebody like Google that dominates everything to where it’s so bad that in Europe, they fined them almost $14 billion and said, you can’t do this in the EU, you may not do this. We’re not willing to do that in the US. Now they even broke ’em up a little. They changed the way they did business. There was a bit of a breakup. It wasn’t enough. And I think in the United States, we know how this is gonna end, don’t we? What’s your guess? Five.
Farron Cousins: Oh, $500 million fine. Maybe upwards of a billion if they’re feeling antsy. But that’s all that’ll happen. It’s the same thing that happened with Microsoft. A lot of people think, oh, well, remember the big Microsoft antitrust case and we broke ’em up. No, you didn’t pay attention to what happened next.
Mike Papantonio: That’s right.
Farron Cousins: Because Microsoft was never broken up even after that first judge found that, yes, this is an illegal monopoly. They’re ruining everything. They’re running everything. Break ’em up.
Mike Papantonio: You know what the judge was reversed on? This was a powerful decision this judge made in the Microsoft case. It was critically important. Now all of a sudden he makes a decision that it’s a 300 page order. Well thought out. And they said, well, we’re gonna take it away from you, judge, because you’ve been talking about Microsoft in the public. Now this is a big, this little thing I’m talking about is actually a big topic. It’s where the court system has gotten so dysfunctional that if a company, let’s say a company, let’s take it away from Google, let’s make this more, a little more draconian. Let’s say a pharmaceutical company is making a product that’s killing people. Okay. Under the system now, if you’re a lawyer and you want to warn the public, don’t use this stuff, it’ll kill you. And you want to talk about it in the media. These federal judges have grown up believing we can’t do that. You have human life at risk and we can’t talk about the fact this corporation is making a product that’s killing people. It’s gag orders. It’s just the whole policy of these judges is so archaic and it’s so wrong minded and people are dying because of it. In this situation, nobody died. But the judge was simply saying, listen, this is a ever present danger to the whole monopoly process of the tech industry. He was calling it back then. He said, if you let them do this, everybody else is gonna do it too. And that’s what we’re seeing.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And just to kind of hammer your point home about lawyers not being allowed to talk about cases, um, you and I both, a couple years ago were warned.
Mike Papantonio: Oh yeah.
Farron Cousins: By a judge because the other side complained. We had done a segment on them. They went, ran crying to the judge and said, judge, this is not fair. Look what they’re doing.
Mike Papantonio: I got pulled in the court about it.
Farron Cousins: Right. And then, a few weeks after that happened, those same defendants were allowed to publish an op-ed in the Washington Post.
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: Defending their product. And we, I don’t even know if we’re still not allowed to talk about the issue.
Mike Papantonio: No, no. I’m gonna talk. I went after the Sacklers. I went after the Sacklers. I shed a light on the fact of the criminality of those people with the Purdue company, and I said, this is what’s happened. Well, I probably went a little far, I might have gone farther than that and called ’em something, but I got pulled into court and chastised about it. But here’s the point. We gotta get away from that. This judge that got reversed on the Microsoft case, it would’ve been critical to where we were with Google had that appellate court just let him do what he wanted to do. And that’s break the son of a up and make ’em comply with the rest of the world where it comes to monopoly. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And then a later judge came along and said, okay, well yeah, you’re a monopoly. Pay us a small fine.
Mike Papantonio: Pay us money.
Farron Cousins: And then we’re good.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It’s all about fines.
Farron Cousins: The DOJ gets that money. People need to know that. That becomes their play money.
Mike Papantonio: Right. The DOJ doesn’t put people in prison anymore. Hell, they just fine them. I don’t care how bad the conduct is.
