We know that Google, Amazon, and Apple are big companies with monopolistic tendencies, but many of us have come to accept this a long time ago, ignoring or not aware of the issues cropping up due to these structures. John Oliver has taken on the task to bring these problems in the limelight, talking about Google’s dominance in the search engine industry, Apple’s App Store policies, and Amazon’s grip on third-party sellers during this week’s Last Week Tonight.

AT&T and today’s app stores

Oliver starts the segment by making clear that monopolies have always cropped up, but that the government used to be much quicker and determined at breaking them up. A prime example here is AT&T, which was the sole provider of telecommunications and internet services in the 90s, with people paying overly high prices for long-distance calls and being forced to rent phones from AT&T. Only after the company was broken up did consumers realize how overly expensive the service was, and while the broadband market is anything but brimming with alternatives these days, things have gotten a lot better comparatively.

The moderator then goes on to criticize today’s tech monopolies, citing Apple and its 30% cut on almost all app and in-app purchases on its App Store as the first example. Making matters worse here is the fact that Apple doesn’t allow app developers to bypass its distribution platform at all. To an extent, this is a problem on the Play Store, too, but at least it’s possible to sideload apps on Android — though as Oliver rightfully notes during his monologue multiple times, people will usually stick with the default option, which is the Play Store on virtually all Android devices sold in the US.

This situation is why it's important for both Apple and Google to open up their platforms to third-party payments. This is something that Congress is currently fighting for with its Open App Markets Act, but we're still left waiting for the legislation to be passed into law.

Google Search as the gatekeeper

In fact, criticism against Google takes up the majority of his talk, particularly when it comes to the search engine that is so popular with its 90%+ market share that it has become a verb. Google Search was initially positioned as a neutral way to surf the web, with Google aiming to get its users to relevant websites as quickly as possible back in 2004, as per a Playboy interview with : “We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible.” But this has changed dramatically over the years, with Google now pushing its own services like Maps and Google Flights above anything else, preventing almost two thirds of all searches from ever leaving Google.com.

Some results you see on the Google site are often even copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent, with people often not visiting the sites in question anymore. This is a problem, because site traffic is a key metric used to sell ad space, especially on free sites — and taking away visitors from the site essentially takes away money from these websites.

Screen Shot 2022-06-14 at 11.53.51

The first and only visible "real" search result without scrolling is all the way at the bottom

While Oliver doesn’t go in depth further at this point, this also presents a conflict of interest for Google. The company is also one of the biggest players in the advertising space and sells advertisements to many websites, which will naturally make less money from these advertisements when they don’t have as many visitors as they could have. Websites fighting against Google are essentially biting the hand that feeds them.

Oliver continues, giving Google Flights as an example of how much the company dominates search results, with many Google users no longer clicking through to links to specialized flight search engines anymore, using the Google Flights widget displayed in Google Search instead. And here, Google doesn’t even display the cheapest fares or all available flights in contrast to many good dedicated search engines out there.

Amazon and legislation’s response

Amazon also gets its share of criticism, with Oliver saying that the online retail behemoth routinely undercuts third-party sellers on its website in price, and sometimes even downright copies products from other companies to undercut them in pricing and make more revenue from its own products.

To combat the incoming legislation, big monopolies use the same arguments that AT&T used back in the day to argue against breaking up its business. They claim that things are going to be worse than when they are gatekeepers, with Google even claiming that breaking up Google could literally kill you, though as that AT&T example shows us, things rarely get worse for users when companies are broken up.

While bills against big tech monopolies currently enjoy bipartisan support, a big problem is that at least 17 members of Congress have children who are or were recently employed at Google, Amazon, Meta, or Apple, with Chuck Schumer's daughter standing out as a marketing manager at Meta. Given that Schumer is responsible for calling these bills into vote, it's entirely possible that the whole attack on monopolies could be held up altogether before summer, potentially closing the window on such legislation for a long time. After all, midterm elections are coming up, and that bipartisan work does not look so good when you're out for votes.

Oliver makes the point that even if you should think “Why would I care, everything works just fine for me right now,” you might not even know what you’re missing. He circles back to the AT&T history, where people in the past simply did not know about the possibilities opening up thanks to breaking up the company.

Another example: Google Photos

Another example I personally think of here is Google Photos. The online image library started out pretty innovative, using machine-learning algorithms to help you search through your massive library of photos all while providing free and unlimited storage for all of your content. At the time, there were other paid options out there that offered a similar approach, but only Google was able to do something like this at scale, given that it could crossfinance the losses from this strategy with its already successful business and use all the freely uploaded images to further train its image recognition algorithms.

The other innovative startups in the space then faltered one by one, until only Google was left as a viable cross-platform option. That’s when the company made Photos a paid service, removing unlimited storage. It’s possible that this anti-competitive strategy was not intended by the people working on it, but this strategy only worked because Google is a big mega corporation that could push Google Photos like no competitor could. Now there are only a handful of Google Photos alternatives left, with none providing a service really comparable to Google.