Day: 31 January 2023

According to the American press, the antitrust proceedings initiated by the Department of Justice could result in a recommendation to dismantle Google and its head company Alphabet. The Open Internet Project has long been convinced that the concentration in Google’s hands of the dominant activities of publishing service platforms (such as e-mail or video), advertising services, publishing the web browser, search engine, mobile operating system or distributing mobile applications can only lead Google to abuse this confusion, to the detriment of free and undistorted competition.

This is illustrated by the large number of condemnations of Google. The OIP therefore believes that a dismantling of the Alphabet group and a splitting of Google’s activities into several legally, economically and technologically independent entities would be an effective and necessary solution, provided that such a dismantling is accompanied by the implementation of “algorithmic remedies”, i.e. remedies prohibiting the new entities resulting from the dismantling from using algorithms allowing them to combine their data on a large scale.

Besides Google’s competitors in digital advertising, the victims of these practices are the traditional media, which see the fair revenues to which they are entitled in the digital advertising market slip away in the opacity of billions of second transactions.