Report details how Google and Facebook harm local communities by siphoning resources from local businesses, undermining local news, distorting local democracy
Since 2016, commentators across a swath of disciplines have pointed to Google and Facebook as consequential and harmful actors in the global political and social order.
Context & Ripple Effects
This report from the American Economic Liberties Project extends a critique that has been building since at least [[a:925140|2017, when commentators flagged Google and Facebook's dominance of digital advertising and news discovery as a threat to the diversity of ideas in the US]]. Where earlier coverage framed the harm nationally, this one moves the lens down to the local level: ad dollars leaving Main Street businesses, newsrooms hollowing out, and political processes distorted.
It also lands just weeks before a related escalation — a [[a:959378|Senate report attributing the local journalism crisis partly to Facebook and Google's alleged anticompetitive behavior]] and calling for FTC policing — suggesting the antitrust case against the two platforms was consolidating across advocacy groups and Capitol Hill at the same time.
First-order effects
- Local businesses and local news outlets are named as the direct losers: the report accuses Google and Facebook of capturing advertising and discovery revenue that previously stayed in communities, leaving publishers and merchants with fewer resources.
- Google and Facebook face a sharpened reputational and policy attack that now documents community-level harms rather than abstract market-share concerns, giving regulators and legislators concrete material for hearings and enforcement arguments.
Second-order effects
- The findings feed directly into the FTC-policing push laid out in the Senate's journalism-crisis report, raising the likelihood that AMP-style distribution practices become formal enforcement targets rather than just criticism.
- Publishers and local-business advocates gain a shared evidence base for collective action — licensing demands, coalition lobbying, or support for rival discovery channels — shifting bargaining leverage toward content and commerce providers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural endpoint is a regulatory reclassification of Google and Facebook from neutral intermediaries into gatekeepers whose distribution power over ads, news, and civic information carries affirmative obligations — the same logic driving calls for data ownership and transparency rules after their role in the US election and Brexit.
- Sustained scrutiny of platform funding and influence — including investigations into Big Tech money flowing into academic institutes — points toward broader conflict-of-interest and disclosure regimes covering how these firms underwrite the institutions that study them.
The trend: Antitrust scrutiny of Google and Facebook is migrating from national market-power complaints to documented local harms, converging advocacy groups, Senate investigators, and the FTC on the same gatekeeper-remedy playbook.