At this late date, it is almost trite for a free marketeer to remark that the government’s efforts to muck around in markets routinely yield nasty and unintended results. “This is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups,” economist Henry Hazlitt wrote. “It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.” Inattention to those things not easily seen ends in grave damage inflicted upon forgotten men. Regulators and bureaucrats, however, habitually neglect this fact. Free marketeers, therefore, must continue to repeat themselves.
This is instantiated in the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s case against Google Search. Having secured a dubious (yet narrow) liability finding against Google, which may well fall on appeal, the DOJ’s remedies proposal attempts to pry apart the company’s business model and reorganize the online search industry. The DOJ’s filing will yield nothing good — not for Google, for the companies that contract with it, for the competitive dynamism of the tech sector generally, or for users.
One of the DOJ’s demands deserves special note for its threat to user privacy. The government suggests that Google ought to be forced to disclose data (including user data) to its rivals. This means that Google’s users — who used Google trusting in the privacy of their searches — may soon find their online activities made widely available to far-flung technology companies, whose intentions and data practices cannot be easily verified.
Google’s opponents object that user data is to be anonymized, and that users’ privacy will, therefore, remain uncompromised. Unfortunately, the “anonymity” of purportedly anonymized data all too often proves to be a fiction. Resourceful snoopers can penetrate “anonymity” as easily as police investigators can convince a craven mafioso to turn rat.
In a now-forgotten episode, reported by The New York Times in 2006, AOL revealed 20 million search queries, the data of 657,000 Americans, all anonymized. Without much effort, The Times identified user No. 4417749 as a 62-year-old Georgian widow. Basic analysis of the searches attached to seven digits made plain the name of the user who had made those searches.
“My goodness, it’s my whole personal life,” user No. 4417749 said after learning of The Times’ discovery. “Her searches are a catalog of intentions, curiosity, anxieties and mundane concerns,” the paper added. As many readers no doubt can attest, users’ search queries very often hint at personal circumstances that they would prefer to keep private.
Recent technological developments cast still more doubt on the DOJ’s bid to endanger user privacy. Rampant innovation and evolving user habits have begun to compress Google Search’s dominant position in the search market. Another trite, true, and oft-ignored observation of the free marketeer: government operates at glacial speeds. The time regulators and bureaucrats require to collect themselves and act often renders the problem identified for amelioration obsolete. As President Calvin Coolidge observed, “If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure 9 will go in the ditch and you have only one to battle with.” Indeed, the online search market today hardly resembles that of 2020, the year the DOJ first brought its case.
According to a recent survey, three in five adult Americans now use artificial intelligence for searches. Increasingly, Americans also search on social media platforms or more specialized websites, such as Amazon. The dominance of Google Search — indeed, all general-search engines — is being contested by new competitors, which markets, if allowed to function freely, invariably create.
The DOJ’s urgency in 2020 to interject itself in the tech sector has been forestalled. Five years on, the case has yet to reach its conclusion. Although a district judge will soon make a ruling on the remedies, an appeal by Google on the merits is sure to follow. The end, if it is in sight at all, is far away on the horizon. The salience of the government’s half-decade-old misgivings will only continue to wane. If the DOJ achieves its desired ends, the result will only endanger users. Perhaps it would be better, in the words of the Gershwin brothers, to call the whole thing off.
