>Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the investigation by 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam

If this is a politically motivated attack on the left, why have so many jurisdictions that are controlled by the left leaning party joining in the investigation?

I hope you’re not thinking that I think government intervention is good because it’s the Democrats. I think they truly believe that government intervention is good. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Google is in the unfortunate position that Republicans don’t like them because they are bunch of “hippy liberals” and Democrats are well Democrats.

More accurately, the party is pro free market - which makes sense that a Republican-led government would want to enforce anti-competition or antitrust laws.

That said, in theory at least, the US Justice Department is supposed to be unbiased and not directed by the whims of the parties.

Traditionally, Republican administration don’t block mergers and they don’t try to break up companies.

The Justice Department has never been unbiased. I don’t recall any scandals where the justice department were obviously been manipulated by a Democratic President (I’m not putting it past them), but there have been many reports about Bush II and Trump.

But even if it is not stated, the Justice departments more or less goes after cases along party lines.

You could argue that anticompetitive is not pro-business.

What I don't understand is, if the Republican party is anti-competitive, why haven't they fought against many of the other monopolies that exist. The targeting of Google is... suspicious.

It’s pro “Big business”. Politicians pay lip service to “small businesses” but they don’t care about them. Small businesses don’t donate huge sums of money to PACs.

Why should Republicans care about startups run by tech bro’s being squashed by big companies? It’s not like they will be able to donate large sums to PACs and they are probably hippy liberals too.

Neither of the parties in our political duopoly are hands off.

No. You are correct in pointing out politics is a factor which is unfortunate. Trump wishes to punish Google for not helping him with another election. You won't see any articles on Oracle or Facebook and antitrust because they are currently supporting him.

Suspicious? No. Obvious? Yes.

Not Google, but part of the overall strategy:

"“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/faceboo...

Conservatism is pro free market.

Google has destroyed free market in programmatic ads.

Arguably a giant no-holds-barred antitrust litigation every 15 years (Republican way) is better than onerous legislation that always ends up entrenching the incumbents (Democratic way).

Weird take. What was the case you are thinking of from fifteen years ago? Microsoft was prosecuted by the Clinton administration twice, in 1994 and 1998.

Policies of Clinton administration 1994 would be a Republican administration today.

When was the last time a Republican administration went after a company for anti trust regulation.

For the record, I was just as opposed to government intervention when it came to MS. History shows that the market took care of that. The government had nothing to do with the rise of Amazon, Facebook, Google and the resurgence of Apple to take away MS’s influence on tech.

Google has way too much power in the Online Ads biz. Period. This can't go on like that.

If the entire third party ad serving market imploded how would that be a bad thing?

Besides the usual pathos of all the folks losing their jobs, there's a whole subsection of the internet that would disappear / severely shrink.

You might argue that it probably wouldn't be a huge loss but that would be your perspective there.

Nevermind the fact that the ad serving market, once you remove FB/Google/AMZN, is actually quite broad and diverse, especially in the display/programmatic world.

This being said, Chrome recent announcement wrt privacy & 3rd party cookies might be the final blow for a lot of indies. Not that I disagree with you and I believe a culling and a new approach is required, one that purposely avoid the SV giants and centralisation of data.

So if we are worried about people losing their jobs, should we also care if the environment makes it harder for telemarketers?

Besides if your income is dependent on third party ads, what happens as more people start using ad blockers? A content blocking framework has been built into iOS for 5 years. I haven’t seen a Google ad in half a decade.

I also don’t have a problem with first party ads controlled by the site or podcast ads.

That being said, I put my money where my mouth is. I pay for ad free streaming services and will buy an in app purchase in apps to avoid ads.

Now that Ben Thompson (Stratechery) is offering a podcast version of his Daily Update, I’m thinking about buying a subscription to his newsletter.

Are you sure the "market" did that?

There were massive campaigns against it plus antitrust rulings in the EU.

To this day there is people out there suffering the consequences of MS' policies.

Same for Intel and others.

If the US and EU had not stepped in, what would MS done differently to stop the rise of the current big tech companies?