With expectations of a US government lawsuit against Alphabet’s Google within weeks, two progressive Democrats tweeted support for legal action against tech giants who break the law, in a rare instance of agreement with the Republican administration amid a polarised political environment.
The tweets come as the Justice Department, which has been conducting an antitrust investigation of Google and others, plans to bring a lawsuit against the search and advertising giant as soon as this month, according to sources who said that the probe focused on search and advertising.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, long a critic of Big Tech, tweeted late Thursday that Google “uses its size to bully competitors.”
In her tweets, she reiterated concerns from more than a year ago when she called for antitrust enforcers to force Big Tech firms like Amazon and Facebook to unwind some mergers. Google, she said then, should be forced to sell mapping subsidiary Waze, connected home products company Nest and ad management tool DoubleClick.
“For the good of our country, we must demand our regulators do their jobs & take swift, aggressive action – not kick the can down the road,” she said on Thursday.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Rohit Chopra, a Democratic commissioner, tweeted support on Friday for the investigations into “tech titans,” but did not name Google.
“No company, no matter how big, can be above our laws. It’s time for regulators to take action against any companies that broke them,” he tweeted on Friday.
Google had no immediate comment on the tweets.