Scott Cleland

The impending public filing of the DOJ-Google antitrust complaint effectively will mark publicly the end of the U.S. lax antitrust era of Internet platform “antitrustPollyannaism”

Our polarized Internet world has generated at least one area of extraordinary bipartisan consensus: 77 percent of Americans agree Google, Facebook, and Amazon have too much power.

“The Responsibility Reckoning” that everyone has been witnessing over the last year evidently is finally coming to the FTC with the Senate confirmation of a clean slate of FTC commissioners.

Americans want their right to privacy restored.

Internet users are the forgotten consumers.  

Only three online intermediary platforms command bottleneck distribution control of ~90% of online demand and ~90% of offline supply.

Transactions should be legally treated similarly according to legal precedent – basic fairness.

Three companies now have enormous power over our economy and society. Politicians on both sides should be worried.

Ironically, the world’s leading winner-take-all Internet platforms — Google, Amazon, and Facebook — are the leading voices of the July 12th “Internet-wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality.”

What’s quintessential illegal monopoly behavior?

The facts and analysis that follows will show why it is quite clear that the reviewing antitrust authority will want to be thorough and not cursory in its formal review of this Amazon-WholeFoods transaction.

The expected guilty EU antitrust verdict against Alphabet-Google’s flagship “general search service” for abusing its dominance, will be a tipping point for Alphabet-Google this summer.

If proponents of network neutrality, an Internet non-discrimination principle, truly care about preventing discrimination on the Internet, why do they turn a blind eye to the worst offender of gatekeeper discrimination on the Internet – Alphabet-Google?