united-states constitutional-law
What specific charges is the US Justice Department accusing Google/Alphabet of?
<p>The US Justice Department sued Google/Alphabet on the 20th Oct of this year in an anti-trust lawsuit, alleging that the corporation was illegally using its market muscle to hobble competition. Other parties to the lawsuit include AT&amp;T, Amazon, T-Mobile and Duck, Duck Go.</p>
<p><strong>Q. What specific charges are the US Justice Department making?</strong></p>
<p>Or are we not likely to know until the case is actually in court?</p>
<p><strong>Q. Mindful also of the Cambridge Analytica scandal a few years ago regarding their deceitful and manipulative practises engaged in subverting democracy; and mindful too of the greater scrutiny that the Big Tech companies have faced since then in light of the larger part that social media plays in life of democracies and their citizens; are there any indications that such accusations are on the charge-sheet?</strong></p>
<p>If so, what are they?</p>

<p>So we do know the charges and the entire suit can be found <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1328941/download" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>.  While it is quite a lengthy read, the first paragraph sums up what they are charging, specifically a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which specifically bans Monopolies in buisness formed by anti-competative practices.   In this specific case, the Attorneys General of the U.S. and several states alledge that Google has created an illegal monopoly in the market of internet search and internet advertising (lets be real, google is a verb that means to search on the internet... there's a difficult argument of Monopoly to avoid.).</p>
<p>One of the specifics in this case is that google contracts with mobile phone and computer manufacturing companies to ensure that they are the search engine that ships with the phone to the customer and usually are apps that are difficult or impossible for users to remove from their device, and where it is possible, it's rarely done by customers.   The suit argues this allows google to unfairly capture the bulk of the market share in the areas they are accused of monopolizing and thus prevents competative search engines from growing (If you're stuck with Google, why would you use a competing search engine on their device?  If you can get rid of Google, why would you use a competing search engines cause you already have the one that's a Verb for web searching?).</p>
<p>As for Cambridge Analytica, I don't think that will be in this suit in particular as they are not (to my knowledge) affiliated with Google and datamined Facebook which is a seperate company from Google.   I advise you refine the question you are asking about it and post it as another question as it's difficult to tell what you're asking about it.</p>
