#bigtechregulation — Public Fediverse posts

Opinion: Google Has Become Too Powerful for Democracy to Ignore

By Cliff Potts | WPS News Opinion

BAYBAY CITY, LEYTE, Philippines, August 3, 2026 — 0005 PhST

The question is no longer whether Google has become one of the most influential corporations in human history. That question has already been answered.

The real question is whether any democratic society should permit a single private corporation to exercise such sweeping control over how information is discovered, distributed, monetized, and preserved.

Google is no longer merely a search engine.

Through its parent company, Alphabet, Google controls the world’s dominant search platform, YouTube, the Android operating system, the Google Play Store, one of the largest digital-advertising operations in existence, the Chrome browser, major artificial-intelligence systems, mapping services, analytics, cloud infrastructure, and an extraordinary volume of information about its users.

Each of those operations is powerful on its own.

Combined under one corporate roof, they create a digital ecosystem capable of influencing who is found, who earns money, which businesses reach customers, which applications succeed, which publishers remain visible, and which voices effectively disappear.

That ownership structure creates the opportunity for abuse.

Google Search can reinforce Google advertising. Android can reinforce Google Search. Chrome can reinforce both. The Play Store can dictate the terms under which software developers reach mobile users. YouTube can determine which videos are recommended, which channels qualify for advertising revenue, and which publishers lose practical access to audiences they spent years building.

None of this requires a secret meeting in which executives decide to destroy one particular publisher.

A recommendation system can quietly stop recommending a channel. A search-ranking adjustment can bury a publication. An automated advertising classification can eliminate revenue. An account restriction can remove years of accumulated work.

The person or organization affected may receive little more than a generic notice—or no useful explanation at all.

That is an unacceptable amount of unaccountable power.

Breaking Up Google Is Not a Fringe Proposal

Calls for structural action against Google are not confined to activists, angry creators, or small publishers.

In 2024, a federal court found that Google had illegally maintained monopolies in general search services and general search-text advertising. During the remedies phase, the United States Department of Justice proposed measures that included forcing Google to divest Chrome and restricting its use of Android and other products to protect its search dominance.

The court ultimately rejected the proposed Chrome divestiture. Its final judgment instead prohibited certain exclusive distribution contracts, required Google to provide qualifying competitors with access to specified search and user-interaction data, ordered syndication opportunities for search results and advertising, and established continuing technical oversight.

Those remedies were significant, but the court’s decision not to order a breakup does not make structural separation an unreasonable idea. It confirms that divestiture was seriously proposed, litigated, and considered within an actual federal antitrust case—not invented in an internet comment section.

The Justice Department has also won a separate case in which a federal court found that Google unlawfully monopolized important parts of the open-web digital-advertising market. According to the Justice Department, Google’s conduct harmed publishers, competition, and ultimately the consumers who depend upon information distributed across the open web.

That finding should matter greatly to every independent news organization.

A company that controls advertising technology while also operating competing services does not occupy the position of a neutral intermediary. It participates in the same market it helps govern.

Google disputes allegations against it and continues exercising its legal rights in court. It is entitled to do so.

The public is equally entitled to question whether the company should continue controlling so many interconnected layers of the digital economy.

Europe Already Calls Alphabet a Gatekeeper

The European Union has formally designated Alphabet a digital “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act.

The designation covers core services including Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, YouTube, Android, Chrome, and Alphabet’s online-advertising operations.

The term is appropriate.

These services do not merely compete within digital markets. They frequently determine how other businesses enter those markets, find customers, collect revenue, and survive.

The Digital Markets Act attempts to address that power before another decade-long competition case reaches its conclusion. Instead of relying exclusively upon punishment after damage has occurred, it places advance obligations and prohibitions upon companies possessing entrenched control over essential digital services.

That approach recognizes a basic problem with ordinary antitrust enforcement: by the time a case is investigated, tried, appealed, and remedied, smaller competitors may already be gone.

A fine imposed years later does not restore a publication that closed, a developer who abandoned an application, or a creator whose audience disappeared.

When financial penalties become routine operating expenses, governments must move beyond fines and consider structural remedies.

The Transparency Failure

I cannot honestly claim, without reliable supporting data, that most political creators affected by demonetization or reduced distribution are left-wing, progressive, or pro-democracy publishers.

Progressive creators have accused YouTube of unequal treatment.

Conservative creators have made the opposite accusation.

The available public information does not establish which political group experiences the greatest overall harm.

That absence of evidence does not clear YouTube.

It exposes the transparency problem.

Independent researchers cannot adequately determine whether YouTube’s enforcement is politically neutral because the company does not disclose enough channel-level information about recommendation reductions, monetization classifications, automated decisions, reversals, comparative enforcement, and the practical effects of its algorithms.

YouTube publishes extensive rules governing monetization and advertiser-friendly content. Those policies describe broad categories of material that may receive limited advertising or no advertising.

They do not necessarily tell an individual publisher why views dropped from thousands to hundreds and then to tens.

They do not reveal whether a channel stopped appearing in recommendations.

They do not explain whether an automated system changed its classification of the channel.

They do not demonstrate whether politically comparable channels received comparable treatment.

They do not provide the public with enough information to audit a system that helps determine what billions of people see.

That is the issue.

A system does not need to ban political speech outright to diminish it. It can simply stop showing that speech to people.

I Have Watched the Audience Disappear

This is not an abstract concern for me.

I have watched my own work receive thousands of views, then hundreds, and eventually numbers in the tens. That decline occurred while the company controlling distribution provided no intelligible explanation of what changed.

I cannot prove in a courtroom that Google or YouTube politically targeted Cliff Potts.

I can prove that an opaque, Google-owned system possessed the practical ability to withdraw access to an audience without explaining itself in any meaningful way.

That alone is a democratic problem.

It is also an antitrust problem.

Journalism, political commentary, music, education, and public advocacy increasingly depend upon privately operated systems that can alter distribution without notice. Publishers may technically remain free to speak while being denied any realistic opportunity to be heard.

Freedom of speech is not a legal guarantee of an audience.

But when one corporation has acquired extraordinary control over whether an audience can find that speech, elected governments have every right to investigate how that power is being exercised.

Break Apart the Conflicting Functions

The answer is not another vague request that YouTube “do better.”

The ownership structure itself must be examined.

Search should not reinforce advertising.

Advertising should not reinforce YouTube.

Android should not reinforce Search.

The Play Store should not reinforce every other Google business.

Chrome should not function as another mechanism for protecting Google’s position.

Artificial intelligence should not be allowed to absorb information from independent publishers, answer users directly, and then deprive the original publishers of the traffic required to survive.

Conflicting business functions should be separated.

Self-preferencing should be prohibited.

Recommendation and monetization systems should be independently audited.

Publishers and creators should receive meaningful explanations when distribution or revenue is materially restricted.

Appeals should be decided by accountable human reviewers rather than disappearing into another automated system.

Regulators should have access to the records necessary to determine whether enforcement is consistent, discriminatory, anticompetitive, or politically uneven.

Independent researchers should be permitted to study the effects of recommendation systems without depending entirely upon information selected and released by the company being examined.

When fines fail to change conduct, structural separation should remain available.

These are not attacks upon innovation.

They are protections against concentrated power.

Democratic societies regulate utilities, financial institutions, telecommunications systems, transportation networks, and other industries capable of affecting the public at enormous scale.

They should not exempt the corporations governing digital discovery merely because their control is exercised through algorithms instead of physical gates.

No private company should possess the practical ability to determine who is discovered, who is heard, who earns a living, and who quietly disappears from public view without meaningful explanation or independent oversight.

Google has become too powerful for democracy to ignore.

The only remaining question is whether democratic governments will act before that power becomes permanent.

Sources

U.S. Department of Justice: Department of Justice Prevails in Landmark Antitrust Case Against Google

U.S. Department of Justice: Department of Justice Wins Significant Remedies Against Google

U.S. Department of Justice: United States and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC

European Commission: Digital Markets Act Designated Gatekeepers

European Commission: The Digital Markets Act

YouTube: Channel Monetization Policies

YouTube: What Kind of Content Can I Monetize?

Contact Cliff Potts

Cliff Potts
Founder, Publisher & Editor
WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines

WPS News
WPS.News

Bluesky — Preferred Public Contact
WTFM.LOL

Occupy 2.5
Occupy25.com

Cliff Potts
CliffPotts.org

Cliff Potts is also the creator of Cliff Potts & the AI Rebellion, with music available on Spotify, iHeartRadio, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, TIDAL, Pandora, and other major streaming platforms worldwide.

For news, commentary, music, and ongoing projects, begin with WPS.News or contact Cliff publicly through Bluesky at WTFM.LOL.

The Internet Was Built With Public Money

Its Private Gatekeepers Must Answer to the Public.

By Cliff Potts | WPS News

BAYBAY CITY, LEYTE, Philippines, July 27, 2026 — 0005 PhST

The European Union’s decision to fine Google €890 million—approximately US$1 billion—is more than another regulatory dispute between Brussels and an enormously profitable American corporation. It raises a question governments should have confronted decades ago: How did private companies acquire the power to determine who may be found, heard, read, and economically successful on a communications system built substantially with public money?

The European Commission imposed €460 million of the penalty because Google allegedly favored its own shopping, hotel, flight, and other commercial services in search results. Another €430 million concerned Google Play restrictions that prevented application developers from freely directing customers toward less expensive purchasing options outside Google’s store (European Commission, 2026; Reuters, 2026).

Google disputes the European findings and may challenge the penalties. However, the larger issue is not whether one particular search-result design was convenient or whether a developer signed a contract containing restrictive terms. The issue is whether a corporation that controls a primary gateway to information should be permitted to use that position to benefit its own businesses and disadvantage smaller competitors.

Google is not merely another website competing for attention. It operates infrastructure that determines whether millions of other websites receive attention at all.

The public built the foundation

The internet was not created in a Silicon Valley garage.

Its foundations emerged from decades of publicly funded research, including work by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation. NSFNET became the principal American internet backbone, growing from approximately 2,000 connected computers in 1986 to more than 2 million by 1993. The National Science Foundation retired that publicly supported backbone in 1995 as commercial internet services expanded (National Science Foundation, n.d.).

Private companies subsequently invested enormous amounts in fiber-optic networks, cellular systems, data centers, software, cloud computing, and consumer services. That investment should not be dismissed. Nevertheless, it was built upon protocols, research, networks, and technical knowledge created with substantial support from American taxpayers, public universities, government laboratories, and publicly funded researchers.

Tor offers another instructive example.

The onion-routing research that eventually produced Tor began at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. The technology was designed to permit private communication across public networks by passing encrypted traffic through multiple relays. Its developers later released the software publicly, and the independent Tor Project eventually assumed responsibility for its continued development (Tor Project, n.d.).

That public release was not merely charity. An anonymity network used only by government personnel would provide little anonymity because participation itself could identify a user as a government agent. A broad civilian network provided the crowd in which official users could disappear. At the same time, the technology became useful to journalists, dissidents, whistleblowers, researchers, abuse survivors, and people living under censorship.

Tor demonstrates that publicly financed technology can remain broadly available as civic infrastructure rather than becoming a privately controlled tollbooth.

Private companies became private governments

The problem is not that businesses were permitted to operate online. Commercial participation helped transform a specialized research network into a global communications system.

The problem is that elected governments allowed a handful of businesses to become the internet’s unelected governments.

Google influences what information people discover. Meta determines which publishers and creators reach audiences who have already chosen to follow them. Apple and Google control access to most mobile application users. Major cloud providers control systems upon which businesses, governments, publishers, and public services increasingly depend.

These corporations establish rules, impose penalties, change algorithms, restrict distribution, collect information, and decide which competing services are visible. Their decisions can destroy a small business or independent publication without a hearing, explanation, meaningful appeal, or democratic accountability.

An independent publisher such as WPS News does not need to be personally targeted to be harmed. A search company can reduce traffic to thousands of publishers simultaneously by changing an algorithm, placing its own services above independent results, or using artificial intelligence to answer questions directly without sending readers to the original reporting.

The injury may be impersonal, but it is still real.

A publisher can conduct research, produce original work, maintain a website, follow technical recommendations, and publish consistently—only to discover that access to readers depends upon machinery controlled by companies that may operate competing news, advertising, video, artificial-intelligence, or information services.

That is not an open marketplace. It is economic dependence upon a gatekeeper.

Regulation is not theft

Corporate defenders frequently describe regulation as government interference with private enterprise. That description ignores both the public origin of the network and the power these companies now exercise over others.

The public financed much of the road. Private companies built businesses beside it, improved portions of it, and created useful vehicles for traveling upon it. They were then allowed to erect tollbooths, redirect traffic toward their own stores, and decide which smaller operators could place signs along the highway.

Elected officials have every right—and a public duty—to question that arrangement.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act identifies exceptionally powerful technology companies as “gatekeepers” and subjects them to requirements intended to make digital markets fairer and more contestable. The law is explicitly designed to prevent dominant platforms from using control of essential services to suppress competition (European Commission, n.d.).

The €890 million penalty will not dismantle Google, democratize the internet, or guarantee traffic for independent publishers. Google can absorb a billion-dollar fine more easily than almost any small competitor can absorb a bad month.

Meaningful regulation must therefore do more than collect money. It must change behavior.

Dominant search services should not secretly favor their own commercial operations. Application stores should not prevent developers from informing customers about alternatives. Ranking systems that determine economic survival require greater transparency. Publishers should have enforceable rights concerning how their work is copied, summarized, indexed, and used to train or operate artificial-intelligence systems.

Governments did not spend decades creating a global communications network so that several corporations could privately determine who deserves access to the public.

American taxpayers paid for the foundation. Their parents paid for it. Their institutions built it. Their elected representatives are entitled to demand that the businesses occupying its most powerful gateways operate fairly.

The internet may no longer be publicly owned in any simple legal or physical sense. But it remains a public highway in function, necessity, and origin.

The public has every right to insist that its gatekeepers answer to the people traveling upon it.

References

European Commission. (2026). Digital Markets Act enforcement concerning Google Search and Google Play.

European Commission. (n.d.). Digital Markets Act: Ensuring fair and contestable digital markets.

National Science Foundation. (n.d.). Birth of the commercial internet.

Reuters. (2026, July 23). Google hit with $1 billion EU fine in first penalties under landmark rules.

Tor Project. (n.d.). History of Tor and onion routing.

EC finds Meta and TikTok breached transparency rules under DSA

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/24/ec-finds-meta-and-tiktok-breached-transparency-rules-under-dsa/

I haven't played Minecraft since 2021, so I didn't realize until today that my purchase of the game got nuked because the period for Mojang-to-Microsoft account migration has ended. Oops. If my understanding is correct, I would need to pay another $30 just to play Minecraft again via official means, even though I can still log into my account that I've had for 10 years now. That is BS, and I will not be giving Microsoft money for that scummy move 😡

Not exactly #stopkillinggames, but this is in the same vein I believe.

#gaming #videogames #minecraft #minecraftjavaedition #bigtech #bigtechmustgo #bigtechcriticism #bigtechregulation #tech #techtalk #microsoft #fuckmicrosoft #fuckmicroshit #fuckmicrosoftp #microshit #microshite #MicrosoftSupportGroup #MicrosoftSureLivesUpToTheirName #MicroAndSoft

EU Tiptoes Around Big Tech Fines, Dialing Back DMA Enforcement to Dodge Trump-Era Tensions

#BigTech #EUComission #DMA #BigTechRegulation #USA #DigitalMarketsAct #Apple #Meta #TechPolicy #Regulation #TrumpTechPolicy #Gatekeepers #EuropeTechLaw

https://winbuzzer.com/2025/03/28/eu-tiptoes-around-big-tech-fines-dialing-back-dma-enforcement-to-dodge-trump-era-tensions-xcxwbn/

#Google is a pain in the ass. I hit my storage limit, deleted a couple large files, and they still won't let me edit my Google files.

They're purposefully making it painful just so I'll sign up for $2 a month storage.

#GoogleIsNotYourFriend #BigData #BigTechRegulation