Qasim Rashid column: For small companies and extra, antitrust replace is essential within the Massive Tech period | Columnists

At a field hearing held by the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee in January 2020 in Boulder, Colorado, small businesses explained how Amazon is abusing its power as a major online platform to force small vendors to change their prices to use Amazon – or otherwise losing access to Amazon’s numerous customers. One small company compared Amazon’s tactics, such as forcing small sellers to compete with counterfeit products in order to get revenge for not cutting their prices, to “bullying with a smile”.

Like Amazon, Google has exploited the pandemic to the detriment of small businesses. According to Business Insider, 90% of Internet searches in the US are done through Google or its subsidiary YouTube. Google uses its search monopoly to extract consumer data (usually without our consent) which it then uses to sell ads that creepily match the user’s online history.

No other digital advertising service has the consumer data necessary to serve such laser-focused ads. So businesses looking to advertise online – including small businesses – have essentially no choice but to use Google to reach customers.

Google’s monopoly on digital advertising is also hurting small newspapers that rely on web traffic to sell digital ads, which are their main source of income. Google stops this source of income by posting the links to its articles in its search results without compensating the newspapers for their content.