Google can no longer count on political goodwill at home
Missouri’sattorney-general, Josh Hawley, may not be the last politician to target the search giant
Nov 23rd 2017 | SANFRANCISCO
“WE USED to be so dismissed,” says Jeremy Stoppelman, the boss of Yelp, an online-review site which has waged a six-year-long battle against Google over how the online giant ranks its search results. Now American regulators are taking concerns about Google more seriously. On November 13th, Josh Hawley, Missouri’s attorney-general, launched an investigation into the search giant to determine whether it had violated the state’s antitrust and consumer-protection laws.Other entrepreneurs, too, congratulate Mr Stoppelman for speaking out about Google; they would not have done so before.
Until then it had been chiefly in Europe where Google had trouble. In June the European Commission announced a record-breaking €2.4bn ($2.7bn) fine against it for anticompetitive behaviour, concluding it had suppressed online-shopping results from rivals in its search results. Other investigations into Google’s behaviour in European countries are ongoing. America has taken a more benign view of its home-grown giant. One of its competition watchdogs, the Federal Trade Commission(FTC), spent a few years investigating Google for anticompetitive behaviour, but its five commissioners voted in early 2013 to close the inquiry after Google agreed to tweak some of its practices.
benign: mild and pleasant, not causing harm or damage
tweak: to change something slightly in order to improve it: to make small adjustments to something
Will America go the way of Europe and abandon its Googlephilia? There are reasons to think that attitudes have already changed. One is that more states are starting to scrutinise Google over its policies about collecting consumer data and its allegedly anticompetitive behaviour toward smaller firms such as Yelp. Google has 60 days to respond with the information that Mr Hawley has requested or go to court.
As a Republican candidate for the Senate in 2018, Mr Hawley is probably motivated in part by a quest for national attention—lashing out at big business can play well in campaigns. Politicians are also gearing up for mid-term elections next November. Many believe that Google and Facebook, a social-media giant, failed Americans by doing too little to screen out Russian ads and content during the 2016 presidential election campaign.
Nor is Mr Hawleyalone in feeling that Google needs closer attention. Last year, Karl Racine, Washington’s attorney-general, and Sean Reyes, Utah’s attorney-general, asked the FTC to reopen its Google investigation. Some other state attorneys-general are also believed to be considering launching inquiries.
scrutinise: to examine something carefully especially in a critical way
打压大公司大集团对于他个人竞选之路是有好处的，毕竟在2016年的大选中， facebook 和google 没有做好本职工作，没有查出俄罗斯对大选的干预活动
States’ investigations could eventually put pressure on the federal government to take action of its own. There is precedent: state attorneys-general hastened the federal government’s decision to pursue strong antitrust action against Microsoft in the late 1990s, notes Gary Reback, a lawyer who worked with some of them in his work opposing Microsoft.
In Washington, DC, there is a new pack of watchdogs selected by President Donald Trump, who received little support from the tech industry during his presidential campaign. In contrast, Barack Obama had strong ties to tech and to Google in particular. Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was influential as an informal adviser to Mr Obama. Some think this helped Google get off too easily in the past. “I worry that the FTC under the Obama administration, which had many close ties to Google, meant that the investigation was not as independent as it might have been,” says Mr Hawley.
precedent: a similar action or event that happened at an earlier time
unprecedented 和这个词是反义词，经常出现，前所未有的
Mr Trump’s nominee to run the FTC, Joe Simons, is a lawyer in private practice who used to run the FTC’s antitrust division and is expected by those who know him to be an aggressive activist. “If the standard narrative is that because the Republicans are in town, Simons is not going to do anything, he will really surprise people,” says William Kovacic, a professor at George Washington University Law School who used to work with Mr Simons at the FTC.
Two other sources of uncertainty for Google and for other tech firms are a newly activist Department of Justice (DoJ), which is tasked with competition issues, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). On November 20th the DoJ sued against a merger between AT&T, a telecoms behemoth, and Time Warner, on antitrust grounds.A day later the FCC said it would gut Obama-era rules on “network neutrality” that ensure broadband providers treat all internet traffic equally. Google might worry that YouTube, its video website, could eventually be disadvantaged.
behemoth: something very big and powerful
“反垄断，反一手遮天”是非常严重的一个事情，企业做太大也是毛病很多
The big question is whether a full overhaul of antitrust law is coming. Google has around 42% of all digital advertising in America and 80% of online search advertising, according to eMarketer, a research firm. In the past watchdogs have based their actions on consumer harm, which is hard to prove in the case of the digital giants as their services are free of charge. The European Commission has taken a view that the suppression of competition is damaging to consumers. Googlers who relied on their popularity with American consumers and politicians to protect them at home can no longer feel so secure.
overhaul: to look at very part of something and repair or replace the parts that do not work
总结： 就是google facebook做的太大了，可以掌握的资源太多了，其他政府机构，牛鬼蛇神就上门来查你，罚你，整顿你啦！
Same stories happen around the world~
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Results
Lexile®Measure: 1200L - 1300L
Mean Sentence Length: 19.31
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.11
Word Count: 811
这篇文章的蓝思值是在1200-1300L， 适合英语专业大三的水平学习，应该是经济学人里属于普通难度，英语专业八级第二篇阅读也差不多这个级别
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