In this blog I discuss The Case Against Google by Charles Duhigg (New York Times Magazine, 2022).

The Case Against Google 

Wait, Bill Gates Wasn't Always a Philanthropist?

Around the time I first read The Case Against Google one sunny San Francisco morning in 2018, I’d just so happened to have recently finished bingeing a revelatory CNN docuseries trio on Netflix called The Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties.

I was obsessed.

Produced by Tom Hanks, each decennial season featured 10 episodes of the same thematic format: an episode following the evolution of music over the decade, film & TV, political turmoil and scandal, domestic terrorism and true crime …

And one episode dedicated to the decade’s evolution of technology.

The three tech episodes across the decade-spanning seasons not only carried a throughline of Microsoft and Apple, but bestowed me with a contextual story about the evolution of computers, the internet, and this thing called tech that I wasn’t even aware I was missing.

It was over the course of this three episode arc in which I discovered, for instance, that Bill Gates was not the docile do-gooder whom I’d grown up mildly cognizant of (I think I used whom correctly there?) On the contrary, Gates spent his first few decades in business (coinciding with my childhood) a bespeckled punkass and ruthless competitor.

I’m aware in some circles that makes me sound wildly uninformed, but what can I say? Growing up in the late 90s and early 00s on the East Coast, my biggest beef with Microsoft was the fact that my Windows-powered Dell would overheat and crash just as I’d put the finishing touches on the most-tricked out MTV Cribs-style mansch on The Sims (or finally gotten an illicit game of footsie going in Hot Date in an unbridled bout of tweenage curiosity).

Duhigg writes,

If you are younger than 29 — which just happens to be the average age of a Google employee, according to a survey done by PayScale — then odds are good you don’t remember much about the Microsoft antitrust battles of the 1990s.

I wholeheartedly identity with this statement. Until I fell into a tech job upon ending up in San Francisco in 2015, I didn’t think a whole lot about computers or search engines or social media - or the men behind them.

I just used them.

Google Steps Into the Monopolist's Seat

The Case Against Google focuses on the antitrust suit against Google brought by Foundem, a small UK tech company with a competing price comparison website. Foundem accused Google of using search algorithms that put its own pricing comparison product at the top of search results while burying those of competitors like Foundem. They argued this was an anti-competitive practice.

Eventually forced by the European Commission to pay a $2.7 billion dollar fine, the case drew attention to the dangers of Big Tech’s influence and size, and sparked debate about the efficacy of antitrust lawsuits against powerful and innovative businesses.

The article stuck with me over the years after my initial read in 2018. While The Case Against Google largely focuses on the struggle of the two English founders going up against the search giant, it also happened to reinforce a lot of the history and context I’d just been absorbing about the evolution of Big Tech on Netflix.. And what’s more more, it raised the intriguing notion that it was the fallout from antitrust lawsuits in the first place that opened up the doors for Google to succeed.

Plainly, it irked me that Google was now playing monopolist in return.

Duhigg describes how prior US government antitrust lawsuits had impactful knock-on effects that leveled the playing field and opened up the doors to new business, technology, and innovation in the latter half of the twentieth century.

He asserts that a lawsuit against IBM in the late 60s made space for Microsoft to emerge in the 80s, and a lawsuit against Microsoft in the late 90s paved the way for Google’s ascendancy in the early 00s.

Despite what Big Tech and venture capitalists might want you to think, Duhigg argues that antitrust laws aren’t bullsh*t. Rather, they “help start-ups build on a monopolist’s breakthroughs without, in the process, being crushed by the monopolist. And then, if those start-ups prosper and make discoveries of their own, they eventually become monopolies themselves, and the cycle starts anew.”

The Cycle of Monopoly in Business

In 1969, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) sued IBM for alleged antitrust violations. The government argued that IBM used its monopoly power in the computer market to stifle competition and drive prices up by engaging in practices such as exclusive dealing agreements and refusing to license its technology.

While the case was eventually settled out of court with IBM agreeing to certain limitations on its business practices, Duhigg contends it did the job.

“ In an earlier attempt to mollify prosecutors, IBM eliminated its practice of bundling hardware and software, a shift that essentially created the software industry. Suddenly, new start-ups could get a foothold simply by writing programs rather than building machines. Microsoft was founded a few years later and soon outpaced IBM.”

It’s weird to think, but prior to the 1970s, software was built for specific hardware. You didn’t build an operating system or software for one computer and expect it to run on another. Microsoft built one of the world’s largest companies by going all in on software, and building standardized software that made all kinds of computers powerful.

Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) reached global domination in the 80s as Microsoft licensed it to almost any PC hardware manufacturer who wanted it, from Comaq to Zenith. Duhigg makes the case that this was all and well, but it was in part IBM’s concessions to the DoJ that afforded the necessary playing space for Microsoft to rise as it did.

However, throughout the 80s and 90s at the helm of CEO Bill Gates, Microsoft took a page from the IBM book and “acted in ways that were predatory and dishonest to preserve its software monopoly.”

“’Is Bill Gates the ’90s answer to Don Corleone?’ Time magazine asked. ‘I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed,’ a witness told investigators.”

Intriguing.

The Federal Trade Commission began a decades-long inquiry into Microsoft’s not-so-innocent domination of the PC industry. But then then came the World Wide Web. Ultimately, it wouldn’t be wouldn’t be Microsoft’s mob-esque behavior in the pursuit of software domination that would accelerate the DoJ’s case - it was freaking Internet Explorer.

In the mid-90s, Netscape Navigator had emerged as the world’s preferred web browser. All you had to do was pay a small fee and download it. In response, Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and bundled it with their Windows 95 OS that was sold on the vast majority of Windows-powered PCs around the world. Due to price, PCs have always had a larger market share than pricier Macs. Almost overnight Netscape Navigator fell into a swift demise, unable to compete with a sh*ttier but free browser that came pre-installed on a ubiquitous Windows PC.

The FTC and the DoJ were already pursuing Microsoft for antitrust violations around the PC operating system, but the Explorer situation added fuel to the fire. It took the greater part of a decade, but the government and Microsoft finally settled in 2001.

According to Business Insider, “The settlement imposed a strict set of restrictions on Microsoft, including the inability to force PC-makers to work exclusively with Microsoft. Microsoft was also required to share its APIs with software developers to allow them to make applications that worked with Windows.”

It wasn’t exactly a grand slam for the US government, but the experience fundamentally changed something inside Microsoft. “In public, Bill Gates was declaring victory,” but Microsoft executives were afraid to mess up again and invite the government to intervene anew. It’s this internal corporate change and caution, Duhigg maintains, that paved the way for fresh new Web 2.0 companies of modern lore.

The Aftermath of the Microsoft Antitrust Case

In the wake of the case against Microsoft, a startup called Google was able to emerge. First it was their search engine, and then it was Docs and Sheets that directly competed with Microsoft. The new startup had cutting edge tech that spoke for itself, and they didn’t need to sue Microsoft into oblivion in order to maintain an edge.

Or that’s what Google would perhaps like you to think.

“The myth that Google humbled Microsoft on its own is wrong.” According to Gary Reback, whose brief description in the article belies a DC-power playing Better Call Saul. “The antitrust attacks on Microsoft made all the difference. Condemning Microsoft as a monopoly is why Google exists today.”

In another world where Microsoft hadn’t spent ten years entangled in anti-monopoly lawsuits, they might have squashed Google Search with the same candor they took to Netscape. But Duhigg postulates that sort of ruthless behavior was beaten out of them at the turn of the millennium, and instead Microsoft would take a backseat to the rise of Web 2.0, social media, and the smartphone in the first two decades of the century.

Should We Be Thankful for Antitrust Laws in Tech?

“Antitrust has always been about progress,” Duhigg writes.

“They are a tool that society uses to help start-ups build on a monopolist’s breakthroughs without, in the process, being crushed by the monopolist. And then, if those start-ups prosper and make discoveries of their own, they eventually become monopolies themselves, and the cycle starts anew.”

He beseeches the reader to imagine a world in which Microsoft had crushed Google in the early 2000s. We’d all be using Bing, blissfully unaware that a superior alternative had once existed. As such, he feels we should be thankful for the “quixotic antitrust lawsuit” that ultimately guaranteed a thriving Google.

Because, as he puts it, “who knows what wondrous new creations are waiting patiently in the wings?”