Google exec on hot seat in Congress over advertising power

A Senate panel put a top Google executive on defensive Tuesday over company’s powerful position in online vertising as some lawmakers look hopefully toward an expected antitrust case against tech giant by Trump ministration.

Donald Harrison, Google’s president for global partnerships and corporate development, insisted at a hearing by Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee that Google’s business faces ample competition, has benefited consumers, and has kept prices low for vertisers and publishers such as local newspapers.

Justice Department has pursued a sweeping antitrust investigation of big tech companies, looking at wher online platforms of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple have hurt competition, stifled invation or orwise harmed consumers. department is reportedly reying a major case accusing Google of abusing its dominance in online search and vertising to stifle competition and boost its profits.

That expected action “could be beginning of a reckoning for our antitrust laws,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, panel’s senior Democrat. She said she hoped “re’s a start” at Justice Department and that also “things are going on” at Federal Tre Commission, which has carried on a separate antitrust investigation of Big Tech companies.

ministration has long h Google in its sights. A top ecomic viser to President Donald Trump said two years ago that White House was considering wher Google searches should be subject to government regulation. Trump himself has often criticized Google, recycling unfounded claims by conservatives that search giant is biased against conservatives and suppresses ir viewpoints, interferes with U.S. elections and prefers working with Chinese military over Pentagon.

Google has denied claims and insisted that it never ranks search results to manipulate political views.

company has ackwledged that it’s been in discussions with Justice Department as well as state attorneys general, without elaborating on nature of talks. A bipartisan coalition of 50 U.S. states and territories, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, anunced a year ago that y were investigating Google’s business practices, citing “potential mopolistic behavior.”

issue of perceived bias by Google against conservatives also arose at Tuesday’s hearing. Subcommittee chairman Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and or Republicans raised an instance in which Google warned Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, that its news website could be banned from making money from Google’s platform because of remarks in site’s comment section that Google considered racist.

Lee told Harrison that Google was applying a double standard in its treatment of Federalist web site, by invoking free-speech legal protections that shield it from liability for users’ offensive comments. “This is how a company acts when it senses, perhaps correctly, that it doesn’t have competition,” Lee said.

But mostly senators homed in on Google’s position in vertising as y questioned Harrison. In “ tech” marketplace bringing toger Google and a huge universe of vertisers and publishers, company controls access to vertisers that put s on its dominant search platform. Google also runs auction process for vertisers to get s onto a publisher’s site. In dition, Google owns Android, which is world’s largest mobile operating system, email systems, video service YouTube and mapping services, which provide it with users’ data that it can deploy in vertising process.

“This looks like mopoly upon mopoly,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who is a leing critic of Big Tech.

Klobuchar cited research showing that Google may be taking between 30% and 70% of every dollar spent by vertisers using its services — money that critics say should go to publishers that produce content and run s, such as newspapers.

Google, whose parent is Alphabet Inc., controls about 90% of web searches. Google has long argued that although its businesses are large, y are useful and beneficial to consumers.

Harrison said that Google shares majority of its “ tech” revenue with publishers.

He rejected even lawmakers’ assertion that Google is dominant, saying that market dominance suggests abuse, which is foreign to company. He reeled off names of competitors in “ tech” business: obe, Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, News Corp., Oracle and Verizon.

“We kw that we’re popular,” Harrison said. “But we don’t agree that we’re dominant.” Consumers have “tons of choices,” he said.

Harrison ted that online vertising prices in U.S. have fallen more than 40% since 2010, according to Federal Reserve data. Last year, Google’s search and vertising tools generated $385 billion in ecomic activity for U.S. businesses, he said.