Chris and I are back tonight for the next LIVE episode of Scotch and Watch, when we’ll be discussing a whistleblower’s devastating take down of Meta in Congress yesterday. Is Meta really a front for Chinese spies??
Join us at 7pm Sydney time 8am in London. Sign up for the app here and you’ll get an alert when we go on air.
Google. Google. Google. Sigh. It’d be easy to throw the illegal search monopoly a bone right now given it’s under attack from all sides.
Only…
Despite being massive, powerful, innovative, and popular, it just keeps eating its foot and making ridiculous strategic mistakes.
Last week, the company which claims it organises the world’s information spooked the White House by silencing half of Europe in a temper tantrum.
Now it’s doubled down on its dumbass egotism by launching a personal attack on Canada’s anti-competition commissioner.
The timing was ridiculous, and the tone was senseless and stupid, because it forced Canada’s hand to go hyper-aggressive. And wow, did Canada take the bait.
In this latest episode of Scotch and Watch, recorded live hours after my spies sent me Canada’s ruling,
and I breakdown the smackdown.Chris says it’s been a long time coming, but in this fun ep you hear how Canada has decided time’s up and Google’s Doomsday Clock is ticking louder than ever.
First, the context:
Canada’s competition bureau announced just before Christmas that it was following the US Department of Justice’s demand for Google to be sold for parts.
The Commissioner outlined the plan, and as is protocol, invited Google to respond. Its lawyers sent back a long and detailed rebuttal.
And then several weeks of silence. How would the Commissioner react?
Canada was coming under tariffs from the US. President Trump was deriding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as leading his 51st State.
Would the famously frozen nation melt under America’s blowtorch? Would the Commissioner be a suckhole, fall into line, and loosen the noose too?
We waited and then, 10 minutes into my stage presentation at the Local And Independent News Association in Melbourne, my iPhone buzzed in my back pocket.
It was a friend who was involved in the competition negotiations. The Commissioner had dropped their report, the mail said. A copy was attached.
It took only to the fifth par to get to the mic drop. Google’s wildly expensive and comprehensive legal riposte “suffers from at least two flaws, both independently fatal”.
The paperwork continues for another 43 pages, but the headline was right up front. Canada was telling Google it was game over.
It wasn’t going to be allowed to play by its self-imposed rules, or America’s. It only gets to play in Canada by Canada’s rules. And the price of entry is to be broken up.
Thanks for all your hard work on this legal response Google, but it’s a hard no.
As entertaining as it is to see the OG tech bully get its comeuppance, this goes far deeper.
This is an independent nation state telling a foreign-owned illegal monopoly it cannot hide behind US power to behave as it chooses overseas. It’s ballsy. And overdue.
Canada also becomes the first nation to call BS on Google’s Olympics-level jazz hands and attempts at mass distraction.
Again and again, through the document, it says it just doesn’t accept Google’s definitions and claims of competition.
It concludes that one thing is true: Google is a monopoly, and uses that monopoly power to lock in customers, degrade its product and hike prices. End of story.
In this episode of Scotch and Watch, Chris and I muse over whether the hard line might have been influenced by Google deciding to take a swing at the Commissioner.
In the ruling it says: “Google's response is replete with groundless ad hominem (personal) attacks, on the Commissioner, including that the Commissioner’s allegations are tactical, concocted, unprincipled, inappropriate, and contrived.”
That approach appears to have entirely backfired. Even if you feel that, you don’t write it down about an official with the ability to dismantle your company.
And we question the strategy of an illegal monopoly considering it OK to call the competition Commissioner of a Sovereign nation state “unprincipled”.
Especially as Google now has Biden’s DoJ, and Trump’s DoJ, and now the Canada all saying it must be taken apart.
Google has fought tooth and nail for decades to avoid a legal precedent. Now that fight is lost, and the queue to take them down stretches across the globe.
There’s also a Go in Google. So let’s f**king go…
Share this post