Senator Orrin Hatch asks FTC to examine Google's search and digital advertising practices for antitrust issues
but Facebook should worry about it anyway Rhett Jones / Gizmodo : After Trump Rants, Top GOP Senator Asks FTC to Re-Open Google Antitrust Probe Joe Setyon / Hit & Run : Orrin Hatch Wants the FTC to Investigate Google Will Oremus / Slate : What Trump's Attack on Big Tech Is Really About Tweets: Garry Buidl Tan / @garrytan : Remember what the feds did to Microsoft? I don't think that company quite ever recovered its edge. Antitrust for mega tech is coming. http://www.bloomberg.com/... Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : “Very antitrust situation”? Pro tip: There's only one level of antitrust. What I said in my column in @nytopinion this week: @realDonaldTrump's allegations about big tech are ludicrous. http://www.bloomberg.com/... Michael Kades / @michael_kades : Throughout his career, @senatorhatch1 has been sympathetic to aggressive antitrust enforcement in certain areas. He deserves credit for pushing the antitrust issues that led to the Microsoft case. Here, he is asking for the @FTC to reopen the Google investigation. http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Hatch's letter lands on ground the FTC already surveyed: a 2012 internal report showed key staff wanted to sue Google over search practices, but the agency declined. The intervening years kept the argument alive — Foundem's long-running complaint framed Google's self-preferencing as exactly the kind of conduct the 'self-correcting internet' thesis excuses.
What changes with this letter is the political vector: a senior Republican senator, prompted by Trump's attacks on Big Tech, formally asking the regulator to reopen the file. Within a year that pressure had metastasized into more than half of US state attorneys general preparing their own Google investigation, and eventually the DOJ suit that Google dismissed as politically driven.
First-order effects
- The FTC faces renewed pressure to revisit the search and digital-advertising conduct it previously declined to litigate, with Hatch's letter giving the request bipartisan cover rather than a partisan one.
- Google must now defend its search ranking and ad practices before a regulator whose own former staff already concluded they were anticompetitive — a harder position than the 2012 review.
Second-order effects
- Facebook, explicitly flagged in the coverage as having reason to worry, becomes the next logical target once the search-ad nexus is under formal examination — platform data advantages start getting read through an antitrust lens.
- State attorneys general gain a template and political momentum from a federal-level ask, converting what was a Washington letter into a multi-jurisdiction enforcement push.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enforcement migrates from discretionary agency restraint toward structural cases against dominant platforms regardless of which party holds the White House — the DOJ complaint two years later shows the escalation path was real, even as critics charged it was driven by election-season politics rather than monopoly doctrine.
- The Microsoft precedent invoked by observers in the coverage hangs over the outcome: a prolonged antitrust campaign that arguably cost the target its edge becomes the cautionary frame both regulators and defendants argue within.
The trend: Antitrust pressure on Big Tech is escalating from congressional letters to multi-agency litigation, with Google serving as the test case for whether either party will actually break with the era of tolerated platform dominance.