The Boston Globe's editorial board on Thursday called for the breakup of Google and said the U.S. should lead the charge in disbanding tech monopolies.
"Never in the history of the world has a single company had so much control over what people know and think," the article reads. "Yet Washington has been slow to recognize that Google's power is a problem, much less embrace the obvious solution: breaking the company up."
Google in 2015 restructured to become Alphabet, and Alphabet now separates financials between Google and its other companies, including Google Fiber, Waymo and DeepMind. Google's advertising business accounts for most of Alphabet's revenue, and posted $26.642 billion in the first quarter of 2018, up nearly 20 percent year-over-year.
"It is ironic that the company perhaps most responsible for unleashing a tidal wave of human creativity, learning, and, yes, competition is also stifling it," according to the Globe. "It is frustrating competition, discouraging innovation, punishing American business, and distorting the free marketplace of commerce and ideas."
The Globe says publishing companies have suffered as Google has thrived in the advertising space, and suggests separating Google search from the rest of the company's ventures to "open up the market for advertising that goes along with search to other vendors."
Another option: to "divide YouTube and Google's advertising units into stand-alone companies and separate them from Alphabet's other ventures."
Google keeps growing, too, and in 2017 spent more than any other company to influence Washington by allocating more than $18 million to lobby Congress, the White House and federal agencies on major issues, according to the Washington Post.
"Google is a monopoly because we've allowed it to become one," the article reads.
"We've allowed it to grow at the expense of copyright holders. At the expense of rival search and advertising ventures. At the expense of startups that might someday challenge the giants. At the expense of a narrowing of the way a society acquires information. Today, the act of searching for an answer is synonymous with Googling. And the first answer for how to rein in this digital giant is also the best: break it up."
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