This is the first of an intermittent series that will focus on the growing need to impose limits on corporate power in communications and on the communications market as a whole. In the current moment of right-wing mobilization and social polarization, it will also be important to try to examine some of the Left’s assumptions about its reliance on communications systems.
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On 6 August 2024, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google had maintained a monopoly in search, and therefore violated U.S. antitrust law. [1] Google said it would appeal the ruling.
After more than two decades of promoting neoliberal policies of unregulated growth for the internet sector, antitrust activism has revived among policymakers, think tanks, and academics.[2] Starting at the tail-end of the Trump administration and continuing under the Biden administration, the U.S. government has renewed anti-monopoly investigations to rein in the tech giants. The government has sued four of them: Amazon, Google (twice), Apple, and Meta.[3] This has been welcomed across the political spectrum.
These anti-trust actions, according to Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), are “part of protecting the free market [to] ensur[e] that market outcomes – who wins and who loses – [are] determined by fair competition rather than by private gatekeepers who can serve as de-facto private regulators.”[4] This argument is rooted in neo-classical economics: The FTC asserts that the current market requires correction because it has “deviated” from “fair” competition, as would exist in a “perfect” market. This view resonates among those who, on the left, embrace a critique of “monopoly capital.” [5]
This renewal of antitrust is to be welcomed, even if it is undertaken for an inadequate reason. A stronger rationale for mounting a political attack against the titans of the internet would be anchored not in neoclassical economics but, rather, in a sweeping critique of corporate power. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and the rest are bad actors for a panoply of reasons. Economically, they stomp all over smaller businesses, whether customers (e.g., advertisers) or suppliers (e.g., news media). Politically, they damage democracy through lobbying, government contracts and other means. Culturally, they saturate us with commercialism, pushing away alternatives. Environmentally, their mammoth data centers force the pace of global heating. In addition to all this, their business model is built upon privacy transgressions, as it surveils and channels individuals as corporate preferences demand.
We should welcome vigorous antitrust policies, therefore, inasmuch as these make it more difficult for the tech companies to continue to have free rein, even if these policies are not based on a far-reaching critique of corporate power – and even if, paradoxically, in the real world of contemporary capitalism, corporate competition has actually intensified.
For, contrary to many accounts, corporate competition has not lessened but increased, alongside the financialization and transnationalization of the political economy. Without a clearer understanding of how competition is structured within the larger framework of today’s capitalism, we won’t be able to strategize on how to limit corporate power – via antitrust or other, more comprehensive means.
Competition is a consequence of capital’s inherent drive for profitable expansion.[6] It is in turn the feature of capitalism that spurs technological change, the search for new markets, and the re-organization of labor to be as productive as possible. In the process of competing, firms may temporarily ally with competitors out of corporate self-interest, to maximize profits.
The intensity of competition often is presumed to correspond to the number of firms in a given industry; if that number is small, then it is supposed to be less competitive. However, this is not necessarily true. Anwar Shaikh, Stephen Maher, Scott Aquanno, and others have argued that competition is, first and foremost, over profits rather than sales or market shares (though the latter are not unimportant).[7]“It therefore takes the form of competition between investment opportunities” within and between industries.[8] Intensity of competition is in turn not a function of the number of firms; rather, it hinges on the mobility of capital regulated by profitability: “the mobility of capital implies that new investment will accelerate relative to demand in industries with higher rates of profit and decelerate relative to demand in industries with lower rates of profit.”[9]
This mobility is facilitated by finance, and by new forms of financialization, which ease the flows of capital across and within industries and countries. Financial capital is notably well-integrated into today’s tech sector.[10] The search engine industry constitutes a major example.
In 2023, the global search engine market was worth $ 205.48 billion, and it is expected to reach $507.37 billion by 2032, with a compounding annual growth rate of 11%.[11] Competition in this sector is in fact intense.
Three big asset management financial firms – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street – are all major shareholders of Google, but that does not preclude them from also investing in new search engine companies. Even if one captures a small fraction of $205.48 billion, this is enough incentive for capital to invest, if the profit rate is high enough. A stream of search engine start-ups continues to spring up.[12]
Foremost, Microsoft Bing is still in the search engine game, as is Yahoo!, which is majority-owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management. Apple has plenty of cash on hand to develop its search. It has spent billions of dollars building out its mapping service and app search. Amazon and Meta function as vertical search engines which index a specific domain, and they are eroding Google’s main source of ads revenue. As of 2023, Amazon is the third-largest advertising platform in the US with $49 billion in ads revenue, trailing behind Google and Facebook.[13]
Google has tried mightily to defend its market share and to deflect competition, including paying Apple $22 billion in 2022 aloneto be its default search engine, but it faces a Sisyphean task to eliminate competition. Economist Howard Botwinick explains the theoretical issue: “Within the context of large-scale enterprise, the relentless drive to expand capital value is necessarily accompanied by a growing struggle over market shares. These two dynamics, accumulation and rivalry, are inextricably bound up with one another.”[14]
In addition, competition has spiraled as firms seek to adapt never-ending new technologies to build adjacent and profitable new markets. Search, social media, e-commerce, mobile, cloud, AI, etc. appear to be separate domains, but all are in play among the major tech companies – which foray into each other’s territories while defending their existing profit centers. In each case they are competing to carve out new profitable businesses, even beyond the internet sectors, through ventures into military, automobile, pharmaceutical, agriculture, education, and healthcare markets.[15]
With AI technologies, there are still further entries into the search market. Open AI, backed by Microsoft and major venture capital, is building its own search engine and threatening Google’s core business. During the first six months of 2024 alone, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta spent $106 billion on AI capital investment.[16] As Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI, puts it, now that the genie has been unleashed they have no choice but to compete in this domain.[17] Other AI entrants have also plunged into the fray. AI-based search engines Perplexity[18] and Genspark[19] have already raised millions of dollars from asset management firms and venture capital.
Let us not forget, furthermore, that Google is a transnational company, so it must also compete against Baidu (China), Naver (South Korea), and Yandex (Russia). Understanding that mere regulatory power is not sufficient to challenge Google, the European Union (EU) has partnered with EU-based tech companies and also joined the race, in an effort to build EU-based search engines against the US companies.[20] OpenWebSearch.EU is just the latest EU initiative in this space.[21] Many of the search engines in Europe have failed, but several of them[22] – Startpage, Escosia, Qwant, and Swisscows – are in the market.
One could argue that none of these companies will compete effectively against Google when, on average, 75% of new venture-backed businesses fail.[23] This is a norm in capitalist markets where firms are engaged in cutthroat competition: some survive, some replace others, and some die: but capital will continue to flow into search as long as the market is profitable. Thus, despite Google controlling a larger share of the market, competition continues. Shaikh calls this “real competition, antagonistic by nature and turbulent in operation. It is as different from so-called perfect competition as war is from ballet.”[24]
Why does this discussion about competition matter? The point is not to defend Google, but to clarify – and to challenge – the workings of the capitalist market.
With this ruling against Google, antitrust advocates are offering a slew of recommendations to create a more “competitive” market to curtail the power of tech. One is to split the Google Chrome browser and mobile OS android from search; another is to ban exclusive deals with Apple. These may chip away at Google’s freedom of maneuver. However, will greater market competition answer the problems we face? In capitalism, Shaikh explains, “competition pits seller against seller, seller against buyer, and buyer against buyer. It pits capital against capital, capital against labor, and labor against labor. It operates not only on prices and profits but also on wages and rents.”[25] In particular, throughout past decades, competition has brutalized the conditions of work and of workers across the world.
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As long as search engine technologies are caught within the market, Google – like its rivals – has to compete and attempt to maximize profits. Thus, implementing anti-trust measures at the level of the individual firm does not address the basic problem. Our question shouldn’t be about how to ensure that Google behaves so as to ensure “fair” and “competitive” market conditions; rather, it should be about what strategies we need to employ to pull search and other vital technologies out of the market altogether – and how we should govern them as common resources. The aim must be to limit not only individual corporate power but the market system that grants them that power.
[1] David McCabe, “‘Google Is a Monopolist,’ Judge Rules in Landmark Antitrust Case,” New York Times (August 5, 2024).
[2] Lina Khan, “The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate,” Journal of European Competition Law & Practice, 9, no. 3 (March 2018), 131–132.
[3] Cecila Kang and David McCabe, “After Google Antitrust Ruling, Here’s Where Other Big Tech Cases Stand,” New York Times, August 5.
[4] Remarks of Chair Lina M. Khan As Prepared for Delivery Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Federal Trade Commission, November 2, 2023.
[5] Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966).
[6] Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016), 259.
[7] Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016); Steven Mayer and Scott Aquanno, The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From JP Morgan to Blackrock (Verso Books, 2024).
[8] Mayer and Aquanno, The Fall and Rise of American Finance, 50.
[9] Shaikh, Capitalism, 264
[10] Niles Peters, “Holding the strings The role of finance in shaping Big Tech,” Transnational Institute, February 4, 2023.
[11] Search Engine Market, DataIntelo.
[12] Search Engine Startups, crunchbase (Accessed August 12, 2024).
[13] Julia Faria, Amazon advertising in the U.S. – statistics & facts, Statista, July 5, 2024,
[14] Howard Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition (Haymarket Books, 2018) 144.
[15] ShinJoung Yeo, Behind Search Box: Google and the Global Internet Industry (University of Illinois Press, 2023). See Chapter 2
[16] Stephen Morris, Hannah Murphy, and Camilla Hodgson, “Big Tech groups say their $100 billion AI spending spree is just beginning,” Financial Times, August 2, 2024.
[17] Cade Metz, “ ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead,” New York Times, May 4, 2023.
[18] Shirin Ghaffary, “AI Search Startup Perplexity Valued at $1 Billion in Funding Round,” Bloomberg, April 23, 2024.
[19] Krystal Hu, “AI search startup Genspark raises $60 million in seed round to challenge Google,” Reuters, June 18, 2024.
[20] Yeo, Behind Search Box, 159-170
[22] Yeo, Behind Search Box,159-170
[23] Deborah Gage, “The Venture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail.” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2012.
[24] Shaikh, Capitalism, 259
[25] Shaikh, Capitalism, 260
