Good morning Search Marketer, will anything happen?
The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust's 449-page report, released this week, concludes that the business practices of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are monopolistic and problematic:
- Each "serves as a gatekeeper over a key channel of distribution."
- Each uses its position to maintain power "by controlling the infrastructure."
- They have "abused their role as intermediaries to further entrench and expand their dominance."
"These firms," the report finds, "typically run the marketplace while also competing in it–a position that enables them to write one set of rules for others, while they play by another, or to engage in a form of their own private quasi regulation that is unaccountable to anyone but themselves."
With Search, Chrome, Maps, Cloud and Android, Google, the committee said, "increasingly functions as an ecosystem of interlocking monopolies." For it's part, Google disputes the committee's conclusions. Greg Sterling dives deeper into the findings and recommendations. As far as what it all means for marketers? Many of the arguments will sound familiar, but don't hold your breath for changes just yet.
Microsoft, which given its own monopolistic reckoning two decades ago, is not part of the House's investigation. It did announce yesterday that its free Digital Marketing Center is now out of beta with new features.
The platform is designed to help SMBs manage AI-powered paid search and social campaigns across Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as well as organic social posts or as many as 10 profiles. Most of the new features give advertisers more visibility into and control over the automations.
Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief
