Name: Google’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Yet Still Extremely Profitable 2020 – The Markup
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Google’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Yet Still Extremely Profitable 2020 – The Markup

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Google faced unprecedented regulatory pressure in 2020 and a financial hit from the pandemic but still managed to pull in $25 billion in profit in the first nine months, on track for another record-breaking year.The COVID-19 pandemic initially , threatening the company’s core business just as American politicians and regulators plotted ways to curtail the company’s power.&nbsp;In October, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against Google, the most significant use of the Sherman Antitrust Act against a tech company since its 1998 case against Microsoft. Less than two months later, 10 state attorneys general, led by Ken Paxton of Texas, filed a in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas alleging additional violations of state and federal antitrust laws and calling for a jury trial. And the next day, attorneys general from 38 states, territories, and Washington, D.C., led by Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, and Tennessee, filed another against Google in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.&nbsp;In response to the suit filed in Texas, Julie McAlister , “Attorney General Paxton’s ad tech claims are meritless, yet he’s gone ahead in spite of all the facts. We will strongly defend ourselves from his baseless claims in court.” And Adam Cohen, Google’s director of economic policy, responded the next day in a to the states’ suit filed in D.C., saying that the “lawsuit seeks to redesign Search in ways that would deprive Americans of helpful information and hurt businesses’ ability to connect directly with customers.”Federal lawmakers also acted. Legislators brought Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai (along with other big tech CEOs) to testify before Congress in contentious hearings and issued a strongly worded bipartisan report calling for more rigorous antitrust oversight from regulators and Congress.And yet, by the end of the year, parent company Alphabet was beating Wall Street’s predictions and raking in profits again. While the pandemic led to a scary second quarter and just $7&nbsp;billion in profits, Alphabet record revenues and $11.2&nbsp;billion in profits in October. In January 2020, Alphabet had become the fourth company in history to hit a . And by December 2020, it was worth $1.19 trillion.Here were some of Google’s most memorable moments in a highly memorable 2020.Does Silicon Valley have too much unchecked power? Antitrust regulators, who have taken a light-touch approach to the tech industry for decades, became considerably more aggressive in 2020. Their first big swing was at Google.In February, the Federal Trade Commission a review of past acquisitions by several tech companies, including Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which owns a slate of properties, including YouTube, Waze, and Motorola, for anticompetitive impact.In July, the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust Pichai, along with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to testify. Democrats and Republicans alike hammered Pichai with questions spanning . The subcommittee subsequently released a lengthy recommending that Congress and regulators step up antitrust enforcement. Alleging that Google “maintained its monopoly over general search through a series of anticompetitive tactics,” the report said the company “increasingly functions as an ecosystem of interlocking monopolies.”Soon afterward, the U.S. Department of Justice a lawsuit alleging Google’s dominance in search and advertising had led to antitrust violations. Google senior vice president of global affairs Kent Walker the lawsuit “deeply flawed.”&nbsp;Then in December, the Federal Trade Commission&nbsp; ordered nine tech companies, including Google, to about how they use people’s data, and two lawsuits brought by state attorneys general accused Google of anticompetitive abuse.Meanwhile, Google’s $2.1 billion acquisition of the health tracking company Fitbit, announced at the end of 2019, is still pending as European regulators .Antitrust regulators have historically been more aggressive in Europe, and scrutiny continued in 2020. However, European regulators have struggled to meaningfully restore competition against Google. In January, Google began for the default search engine menu on Android phones in the E.U.—a response to a from the European Commission for abusing its dominant control of the Android operating system in order to promote its search engine. One prominent Google critic, competitor DuckDuckGo (disclosure: DuckDuckGo has to The Markup), said the remedy is actually .The Commission has been responsible for the most severe antitrust penalties levied against Google to date: three multibillion-dollar fines since 2017. In February, Google all three at the General Court in Luxembourg. If it loses, it has one more shot, in the European Court of Justice.In December, the Commission proposed that will introduce additional oversight and higher penalties for anti-competitive behavior by tech platforms, including fines of as much as 10 percent of worldwide revenue and forced breakups for repeat offenders. If adopted, these rules would significantly strengthen the commission’s ability to regulate Google.Google also faced legal challenges from competitors. Sonos, the wireless speaker company, has become a thorn in Google’s side with a alleging theft of its technology. And Epic Games Apple and Google into removing its popular game Fortnite from their app stores in August by selling its in-app currency directly and subverting their platform fees. The company then in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California antitrust violations that is seen as “” in tech antitrust, according to Bloomberg. Apple and Google have countersued.Some of the company’s strongest criticism comes from within. Google employee and shareholder activism has noticeably over the past three years, and in some cases, Google has responded.&nbsp;The year started with the prominent of Alphabet’s chief legal counsel David Drummond following accusations of sexual misconduct. In September, Alphabet’s board settled a over its alleged mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations against Drummond and others. Under the , the company agreed to spend $310&nbsp;million on “workplace initiatives” to make Alphabet more inclusive for employees from underrepresented groups and ended mandatory arbitration for “harassment, discrimination, and retaliation disputes” at all its subsidiaries, enabling people to sue in those situations. In December, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Google alleging that the company wrongly Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers for exercising their rights under labor law. Berland was advocating for employees to have including hate speech on YouTube, while Spiers was trying to unionize her team. Google spokesperson Jennifer Rodstrom that Google will fight the charge.Your gift helps us hold Big Tech to account.That very same day, Google Timnit Gebru, a prominent Black researcher known for exposing bias in systems built around machine learning. Gebru, whose team at Google was tasked with “,” spoke out after a Google manager asked her to retract or take her name off a on ethical challenges in natural language processing. Gebru criticized the company’s on diversity goals and cited the rejection of her paper as an example of “silencing marginalized voices.” She says she was fired; her supervisor, Jeff Dean, . More than 2,000 Google employees and more than 4,000 supporters outside the company a supportive petition, posted on the blog used to organize previous Google walkouts. Pichai employees saying Google will “review the circumstances that led up to Dr. Gebru’s departure.”The pandemic presented new challenges for Google, including an increased on automated content moderation as it adjusted to having so many workers out of the office. Google temporarily froze business reviews, restricted coronavirus-related ads, and banned pandemic-related misinformation on YouTube. Still, one “Plandemic” COVID-19 conspiracy theory video reached . Then, a contentious presidential election brought a surge of political misinformation that YouTube scrambled to police. In December, YouTube it will remove videos that allege widespread errors or fraud in the presidential results.Meanwhile, Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences subsidiary, looked to become a pandemic resource, launching a minimal website in March to help people in California get tested for COVID-19. It within hours. Verily expanded its program, but in October the counties that include Oakland and San Francisco announced they were the program due to privacy concerns and lack of penetration in low-income communities. Google and Apple rolled out a in iPhone and Android phones that allowed for privacy-protecting contact tracing, but .Financially, it looked earlier in the year as if Google might take a big hit. The company is heavily dependent on advertising, and travel companies are some of its biggest customers. When the pandemic first hit, Alphabet announced it would and posted a year-over-year decrease in advertising revenue . But by October, Google had reversed its slide. Alphabet beat analyst expectations in the third quarter, posting a 14 percent growth in revenue over last year. “While we’re pleased with our performance in the third quarter, there is obviously uncertainty in the external environment,” Ruth Porat, Google’s chief financial officer, on a call with investors.Your contributions help us investigate how powerful institutions’ use of technology affects our society. Please donate today!RepublishWe’re happy to make this story free and available to republish for free under an . This allows you to republish the article, but does not include the images or graphics other than the credit image. You must credit The Markup. 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Google faced unprecedented regulatory pressure in 2020 and a financial hit from the pandemic but still managed to pull in $25 billion in profit in the first nine months, on track for another record-breaking year.The COVID-19 pandemic initially , threatening the company’s core business just as American politicians and regulators plotted ways to curtail the company’s power.&nbsp;In October, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against Google, the most significant use of the Sherman Antitrust Act against a tech company since its 1998...

Google’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Yet Still Extremely Profitable 2020 – The Markup

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