Oracle’s Hidden Hand is Behind the Google Antitrust Lawsuits
fliptop writes:
After spending years working behind the scenes to persuade regulators and law enforcement agencies in Washington DC, 30 states, and at least a dozen other countries, Oracle's efforts to rein in Google's search-and-advertising business are paying off:
With great fanfare last week, 44 attorneys general hit Google with two antitrust complaints, following a landmark lawsuit the Justice Department and 11 states lodged against the Alphabet Inc. unit in October.
[...] Officials in more than a dozen of the states that sued Google received what has been called Oracle's black box" presentation showing how Google tracks users' personal information, said Ken Glueck, Oracle's top Washington lobbyist and the architect of the software company's antitrust campaign against Google.
Glueck outlined for Bloomberg the presentation, which often entails putting an Android phone inside a black briefcase to show how Google collects users' location details - even when the phones aren't in use - and confirmed the contours of the pressure campaign.
[...] The onslaught of antitrust challenges is hardly just Oracle's doing. Government officials, academics, lawmakers and public-interest groups have agreed for some time that U.S. technology giants have gotten so big that they are squeezing out competition and dragging down economic growth. Oracle acted on those concerns early, even if largely out of self-interest.
Original story reported by Bloomberg and appeared on MSN.
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