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

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

“The problem is Google’s business model,” said Cicilline, citing a pattern of anti-competitive behavior that allowed Google to grow as small businesses were crushed. “Our documents show that Google evolved from a turnstile to the rest of the web to a walled garden that increasingly keeps users on its sites.”

Cicilline cited specific “more than a decade ago” emails among Google employees discussing sites that were growing and trafficking. Employees “began to fear competition from certain websites [and] Web pages that could divert Google search traffic and revenue, “said Cicilline.

For years, companies like Yelp have accused Google of stealing their content from searches, diverting clicks from their own sites and those of Google. According to Cicilline, the committee’s investigation shows that when Yelp raised these concerns with the company, Google threatened to remove the list from the website unless it was allowed to remove its content.

“Isn’t that anti-competitive?” Cicilline asked Pichai.

Pichai did not directly address the concerns of the competition and replied: “When I run the company, I am really focused on giving users what they want. We behave at the highest level. ”

Google is already under various formal antitrust investigations by the police. Both the Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys general are involved in investigations of the tech giant, and California opened its own antitrust investigation into the company earlier this month.

Cicilline specifically cited interviews with small businesses and emails among Google employees suggesting that the company uses surveillance information about web traffic to identify potential competitors and that it drives its own sites and products in search.

“These documents show that Google staff discussed ‘the growing threat’ that these web pages pose to Google. Any loss of traffic to other sites was a loss of revenue, ”said Cicilline.

On Tuesday, The market released a report suggesting that Google prioritizes its own products and services on a significant portion of links on the first page of search results.

The second half of Cicilline’s questions focused on Google’s monitoring capabilities on web traffic to identify emerging competitors. Cicilline asked directly, “Has Google ever used its web traffic surveillance to identify competitive threats?”

Pichai did not deny the accusation directly. “Congressman, like other companies, we try to understand trends from the data we can see, and we use it to improve our products for users.”