The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) earlier this week slapped Google with an antitrust lawsuit accusing the company of abusing its market power to stifle competition. The lawsuit alleges that the Mountain View company holds an illegal monopoly over internet search and search advertising.
As you’d expect, Google is not happy about it. In a lengthy blog post penned by Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker, who is also the SVP of Global Affairs at the company, Google said that the DOJ’s case is “deeply flawed” and “would do nothing to help consumers.”
Now, it appears Google employees also share this same opinion. In a poll asking “Do you agree with [the] US gov[ernment] for suing Google for antitrust?”, an overwhelmingly high number of polled Google professionals echoed Walker’s sentiments.
The user-ran poll on teamblind.com, an anonymous professional network, offered two choices – “Yes, the lawsuit has a merit” and “No, Google did not illegally protect its monopoly”. A total of 3,106 professionals responded to the poll, with 57 percent of them believing the DOJ’s case is on point.
While 43 percent of the respondents don’t approve of the lawsuit, that number goes significantly up in the case of Google professionals. 87 percent of them say it’s indeed a “deeply flawed” lawsuit. Only 13 percent of Google employees believe that the lawsuit has merit.
By contrast, 80 percent of Adobe professionals, 76 percent of Microsoft professionals, 72 percent of Oracle professionals, and 71 percent of LinkedIn professionals are supportive of the lawsuit. A majority of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Uber, Walmart, Qualcomm, and Intel employees also believe Google has abused its market power.
People working at Cisco, Salesforce, SAP, Capital One, VMware, and Expedia Group also responded to the poll. Unsurprisingly, most of them selected the “Yes, the lawsuit has a merit” option.
Google employees aren’t happy about the DOJ’s lawsuit either
In his blog post, Kent Walker had said that Google isn’t forcibly making people use Google over rival services. “The bigger point is that people don’t use Google because they have to, they use it because they choose to,” he said. And that’s precisely what most of its employees believe, at least according to the aforementioned poll.
In a separate post, Google has pointed out how its free services are helping people and small businesses across America. The company talks about several of its free-to-use products and services. The post also details its approach to competition in the US.
However, Google understandably fails to bring up the point of user data it gets from those so-called free services. And that’s one of the major bases for DOJ’s lawsuit.
It might take years for this lawsuit to play out. There have been reports of the DOJ and state AGs mulling over the idea of forcing a breakup of Google. Precisely, they wanted the company to sell its Chrome browser and a portion of its ad business. It now remains to be seen if this lawsuit is the beginning of the end of Google as we know it.