Google’s business model ‘is the problem,’ David Cicilline says

Photo by Mandel Ngan-Pool / Getty Images During Wednesday’s tech antitrust hearing, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) tore into Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the company’s dominance in search and its use of data to monitor would-be competitors. “It is Google’s business model that is the problem,” Cicilline said, alleging a pattern of anti-competitive behavior that allowed Google to grow while smaller businesses were crushed. “Our documents show that Google evolved from a turnstile to the rest of the web to a walled garden that increasingly keeps users within its sites.” Cicilline cited specific emails from “over a decade ago” between Google employees discussing sites that were growing and traffic. Employees “started to fear competition from certain websites [and] web pages that... Continue reading…