Google Comes Under Congress Radar Once Again, May Be Forced to Split Its Business Units

Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has come under the radar of the Congress Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, in its recently released report on the anticompetitive behaviors of the big tech firms including Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN), Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) and Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL). According to the report, the Congress Anti-Trust committee accused Google of creating a massive monopoly across the spheres of its services by promoting its services such as the Google Chrome browser, Maps, and others at the expense of competitors.

Per the report which was compiled from the information gathered through hearings, interviews, and about 1.3 million documents, Google’s anticompetitive behavior was mostly fueled by the company’s executives dating back to administrations before Sundar Pichai. One of the highlighted faults of the company is based on the company’s search engine Google Chrome.

“Google abused its gatekeeper power over online search to coerce vertical websites to surrender valuable data and to leverage its search dominance into adjacent markets,” the report states, adding that “Google used its search engine dominance and control over the Android operating system to grow its share of the web browser market and favor its other lines of business.”

The report also warned of furthering “potential” unfair behavior in the company’s growing cloud business and its Fitbit acquisition proposal, as the firm has a track record of incorporating data from acquired rivals to further promote its existing services as seen in the case of DoubleClick, a tech advertising company Google acquired in 2007. Following other allegations including forcing rivals to pay more for ranking on its search engine, the AntiTrust committee is proposing a breakup in Google and other top tech firm’s business units while putting forth measures to make future acquisitions more difficult.

Alphabet Inc whose share price closed 2.13% lower on Tuesday has refuted these claims in a statement according to CNBC, saying any irrational move by the congress may hurt consumers more than intended.

“Google’s free products like Search, Maps, and Gmail help millions of Americans and we’ve invested billions of dollars in research and development to build and improve them. We compete fairly in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry. We disagree with today’s reports, which feature outdated and inaccurate allegations from commercial rivals about Search and other services,” Google said.

Besides Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook also Got Congress Spanking

Besides Alphabet-owned Google, the other tech firms including Amazon, Apple, and Facebook also got their fair share of spanking from the Congress Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust.

While the firms have different aspects in which the got faulted, the general tag is ‘monopoly’, a condition the house may pass legislation to correct moving forward.