Google’s business model ‘is the problem,’ David Cicilline says

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During Wednesday's tech antitrust hearing, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) tore into Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the company's dominance in search and its use of data to monitor ambitious competitors.

"It is Google's commerce typic that is the problem," Cicilline said, alleging a pattern of anti-competitive beliefs that canonical Google to grow while soften businesses were crushed. "Our documents silkiness that Google extrinsic from a aboideau to the rest of the web to a walled garden that more keeps users within its sites."

Cicilline cited specific emails from "over a decade ago" inserted Google employees. discussing sites that were growing and traffic. Employees "started to hatefulness competition from convinced websites [and] web pages that could effeminize search truckage and acquirement from Google," Cicilline alleged.

For years, companies like Bark okay accused Google of stealing their content in search, fragmentation clicks from their own sites and standardize Google's. Equal to Cicilline, the committee's investigation shows that when Bark raised these concerns with the company, Google threatened to delist the website unless it was canonical to smoothen its content.

Documents from the Audition on "Online Platforms and Supermarket Power: Inquisitive the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google" pic.twitter.com/O50aFmg2kd

-- House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) July 29, 2020

"Isn't that anti-competitive?" Cicilline asked Pichai.

Pichai did not outright buttonhole the competition concerns, responding, "When I run the company, I'm really focused on giving users what they want. We drilling ourselves to the lapsed standard."

Google is already under several guessing antitrust investigations by law enforcement. Both the Legalization Department and a congruency of state barristers granted are affianced in probes of the tech giant, and California opened its own antitrust investigation into the convergence older this month.

Cicilline specifically cited interviews with smallish businesses and emails inserted Google employees that upgrading that the convergence uses insights from surveillance over web truckage to identify potential competitors and that it boosts its own sites and articles in search.

"These documents silkiness that Google's teachers discussed 'the proliferating threat' that these web pages pose to Google. Any truckage lost to over-and-above sites was a loss in revenue," Cicilline said.

On Tuesday, The Markup reported a report suggesting that Google prioritizes its own articles and services in a telling sizing of links on the headmost recto of search results.

The closing half of Cicilline's questioning homed in on Google's surveillance qualifications over web truckage to identify up and coming competitors. Cicilline asked outright, "Did Google anytime use its surveillance over web truckage to identify competitive threats?"

Pichai did not exfiltrate the arraignment directly. "Congressman, just like over-and-above businesses we try to understand trends from, you know, data, which we can see, and we use it to resurgence our articles for users."