Google’s Government Woes

Were you one of the many affected by the outage of various Google services last weekend? Perhaps you were furiously typing about your experience of woe and adding it to the lengthy #YouTubeDOWN thread on Twitter? If so, you experienced just a brief glimpse of the headaches that Google has before it.

It’s not just the obligatory public apology/shaming that any tech company has to perform after an outage of any length. More seriously, Google and its parent company, Alphabet,  are facing increasing scrutiny as the Department of Justice moves toward an antitrust probe of the tech giant. The probe is expected to focus on Google’s search business, as well as potentially its advertising practices.

What’s more, unlike other companies (or industries) that have been the subject of government investigations before, Google has very few political allies. Politicians of all stripes have been expressing concern over the power that Google and the other tech behemoths wield, and one assumes there aren’t many that would be willing to stand up for Google in the midst of an antitrust investigation.