Proceedings against Google: "The tech giants have become stronger than the States"

American justice accuses Google of abusing a dominant position.

Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD / AFP

Text by: Agnieszka Kumor

4 min

In the United States, antitrust proceedings have been initiated against Google.

The world's leading online search engine is accused of abuse of a dominant position vis-à-vis its competitors and users.

Three questions to Jean-François Faure, digital expert, president of AuCOFFRE.com.

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Jean-François Faure:

The risk is multiple.

First of all, it can be huge fines.

Then it can also mean a dismantling of the activity.

The Google group would be cut up and some of its activities could be sold to other structures which would be able to buy them back and operate them.

The idea is to make it so that Google doesn't have all the power.

This case resembles in every way that of Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser.

The group had been the target of competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1990s and 2000s, with a lawsuit in the United States and a series of litigation that resulted in heavy fines in Europe.

In addition, Microsoft had to pay damages to several plaintiffs.

What is American justice aiming for today

We remember, indeed, the Microsoft case, which at the time was prohibited from putting too much emphasis on its internet browser.

The argument was that Internet Explorer was destroying competition.

What had happened, moreover, because its direct competitor, Netscape Navigator (published by the company Netscape Communications, editor's note) had simply disappeared at the time.

We are there with Google.

Today this group has such firepower that it is able to develop at an extremely high level of quality a tool which exists as such in the competition, and which is not even offered to a Google user, because if he has not heard of it elsewhere, it is obviously not Google that will offer it.

As with Google, similar investigations have been opened against Amazon, Apple and Facebook.

American justice also suspects them of anti-competitive practices.

What does this legal offensive reflect

Today the tech giants, the famous GAFAMs, have become more powerful than the States.

How to deal with them?

When you have a company whose market valuation is greater than the gross domestic product of a major country, how do you go about considering yourself strong enough to go against it?

We are there.

Maybe today we all belong to a single country called Google or the country Facebook.

Let us recall in passing that the group of Mark Zuckerberg wanted a few months ago to

This announcement frightened sovereign states so much that since then they have not stopped saying that money is a sovereign right.

You can see that today we are at that level.

The American authorities want to dismantle this kind of large companies, to cut a little of their strength because they know that beyond the impact on the end user and on his capacities of choice, credibility is at stake. States.

I am talking about the stakes that the strength of these major players can represent in relation to the States themselves.

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