TNR - The (Sort of) Win Over Google and Meta That Trump and Biden Agree On
Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan asserts that while antitrust wins against Big Tech are a step forward, the real battle lies in dismantling their invasive surveillance advertising model, which exploits our privacy and fuels societal harms.
On July 31, a federal court of appeals upheld Epic Games’s antitrust win over Google for monopolizing the distribution of Android apps and payment processing within apps like Fortnite. This is just the latest legal triumph against Big Tech corporations. In the past year, the U.S. government scored two major victories against Google, successfully challenging the company’s illegal domination of online search and digital advertising tools.
Now Judges Amit Mehta and Leonie Brinkema are deciding how to fix these monopolized markets, and they could order Google to sell off the Chrome browser, the ad platform DoubleClick, and other lines of business. The Federal Trade Commission could soon add to the win tally in the antitrust case against Meta, in which the FTC asked Judge James Boasberg to consider ordering the divestiture of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Yet, even as they may break the long-standing monopolies of Google and Meta and open important digital markets to rivals, these lawsuits leave the harmful business model of the companies largely untouched. These corporations will still make money by tracking our online and offline activities: They will use fine-grained personal portraits that they have developed and continuously refine to serve up “targeted” content. This surveillance advertising, now intensified by artificial intelligence, violates our privacy, fuels discrimination, keeps us addicted to our devices, and wastes energy, water, and highly skilled labor. Curtailing this business model should be the next front in the campaign against Big Tech.
Surveillance advertising is the lifeblood of today’s internet. Firms big and small track us systematically. Google knows the contents of our emails through Gmail; our wants, interests, and needs through search; and where we met a friend for dinner through its maps used to get directions to the restaurant. Relying on a somewhat different set of tools, Meta gathers a great deal of information about us, as well. Countless other firms surveil us too and, in the words of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, “aggregate and sell personal information at industrial scale.” They monitor us not out of curiosity or voyeurism but primarily to aim to understand our needs, wants, and aspirations at each moment, whether it is running shoes, romance, or something else.
For all the hype around AI, many of the leading companies of the digital era are built on the business of advertising. At root, their principal pitch is helping marketers—businesses, political candidates, and foreign states—reach and influence their target audience with greater precision and effectiveness than through alternative channels like billboards, radio, and television. There are at least four big problems with this model.
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