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Last week, the Republican nominee for US President, Donald Trump, chose his running mate. Which is Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, and now we’re starting to learn quite a bit more about him, including the fact that he wants to break up Google.
Earlier this year, Vance tweeted that it’s time “to break Google up”. He went on to say that “this matters far more than any other election integrity issue. The monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.”
Why is Vance so against big tech, including Google? Well one of the reasons centers around the perceived notion that companies like Google have control over what people can say and post online. He has also alleged that voters will see results on Google that could be “explicitly biased towards Democrats”, which Vance says is a “threat to democracy”.
Even if Trump-Vance wins the election this Fall, it’s not a foregone conclusion that Google will be broken up
If the Trump-Vance ticket wins in November, it doesn’t mean that Google will be broken up. But keep in mind that this is a bipartisan issue. In fact, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren ran her 2020 Presidential Campaign on breaking up big tech and making the rich pay their fair share of taxes. So this is an issue that both Democrats and Republicans agree on – which is pretty rare.
However, having Vance in the White House could lead to more discussion on breaking up big tech companies like Google in the future. Though, Vance could also have a conflict of interest here since he is an investor in the video-sharing platform Rumble. Which has filed multiple lawsuits against Google. Those lawsuits center on Google favoring YouTube in search results. Of course, this is not the first time we’ve seen Google favor its own products over competitors in its search results, and likely won’t be the last.
As always, with a presidential election looming, the threat of breaking up big tech is a big topic. Now, the real question is, will it be more than just talk this time?