Free Republic

Are there any other US government employees having issues connecting to their Google email (.gmail.com) account since the DoJ announced the anti-trust lawsuit on 20 October?

Google now faces its first antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. government as the Department of Justice announced its intent to press charges against the tech giant.

The Justice Department is expected to bring an antitrust action against Google in coming weeks, focusing on its dominance in online search and whether it was used to stifle competition and hurt consumers, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press Thursday. The department also is examining Google’s online advertising practices, said the person, who could not discuss an ongoing investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. Antitrust officials at the department briefed state attorneys general Thursday on the planned action against Google, seeking support from states across the country that share concerns about Google’s conduct. The...

- U.S. competition enforcers are preparing a possible antitrust lawsuit against Facebook Inc., according to a person familiar with the matter. The Federal Trade Commission has been investigating Facebook for more than a year over whether the social media giant has harmed competition and could file a case by the end of the year, said the person, who was granted anonymity because the inquiry is confidential. No final decision has been made, the person added. A lawsuit by the FTC would mark another major escalation by U.S. officials in their campaign against America’s technology giants, which have come under intense...

Attorney General William Barr overruled career lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ), setting a deadline for federal prosecutors to file an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet—the parent company of Google—by the end of the month, The New York Times reported on Thursday. According to the report, the team of attorneys who have been working on the case for more than a year strongly oppose the deadline as being too soon to bring a strong case against the tech giant. They worry that Barr is more concerned about filing the high-profile lawsuit before November’s presidential election than allowing the department to...

The New York Times claims in a new report that the Department of Justice has plans to file antitrust charges against Google within the coming weeks. The New York Times reports that the Justice Department plans to bring an antitrust case against Google within the next few weeks after Attorney General William P. Barr reportedly overruled lawyers who said they needed more time to build a case against the tech giant....

Amazon is reportedly in talks with realtors to buy and remake the US locations of bankrupt Sears and JC Penney into Amazon fulfillment centers. The Wall Street Journal cites sources familiar in reporting that Simon Property Group, a commercial retailer specializing in mall locations, was in talks with the Bezos' bunch to sell the now-vacant department store buildings. These will then be used as smaller, local versions warehouses for Amazon to store products before shipping out to customers. Neither Amazon nor Simon Property Group responded to a request for comment on the report. Those unfamiliar with the 1970s-1990s heyday of...

House GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told Breitbart News exclusively this weekend that he is concerned Google is attempting to influence the 2020 presidential election with a “tremendous amount of power” it wields to control “what people think or see” through its monopoly search power. Appearing on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel this weekend, McCarthy said that Breitbart News has “been at the forefront” of exposing big tech. He pointed to Breitbart News uncovering video of an internal Google meeting of senior executives in the wake of the 2016 election when they promised to use...

Twitter has banned all links to the video-sharing site BitChute, in another crackdown by Big Tech against alternative tech companies. BitChute serves as an alternative platform to YouTube, where creators can upload their videos without the worry of censorship. However, this of course, can’t protect BitChute itself from being deplatformed from Big Tech sites, such as Twitter.

On Monday, the Department of Commerce, as directed by President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship, filed a petition to clarify the scope of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The petition requests that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) clarify that Section 230 does not permit social media companies that alter or editorialize users’ speech to escape civil liability. The petition also requests that the FCC clarify when an online platform curates content in “good faith,” and requests transparency requirements on their moderation practices, similar to requirements imposed on broadband service providers under Title...

(Bloomberg) -- The biggest U.S. technology companies have gone on a buying spree this year, waving off intense scrutiny from competition watchdogs and critics who say they’ve bolstered their power by snatching up nascent rivals. The number of acquisitions by the five largest companies -- Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Facebook Inc., and Microsoft Corp. -- came at the fastest pace through June since 2015, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Tech deals are accelerating even in the face of stepped-up antitrust scrutiny under the Trump administration. Federal officials are investigating Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon for antitrust...

This Monday, the U.S. House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee will hold a very important congressional oversight hearing — on a bipartisan basis — with the CEOs of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, as part of an ongoing investigation into Big Tech’s clear anticompetitive conduct, antitrust violations, and other abuses in the digital marketplace. Big Tech’s expansive power to control what Americans see, when we see it, and how we speak makes these online platforms a serious threat to competition, individual privacy, election integrity, and independent thought. And Big Tech’s enormous — and rapidly growing — power is particularly problematic for conservatives,...

Fifth Company to Admit It Fixed Prices of Generic Drugs Taro Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc. (Taro U.S.A.) has been charged for conspiring to fix prices, allocate customers, and rig bids for generic drugs, the Department of Justice announced today. A two-count felony charge was filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, charging Taro U.S.A. with participating in two criminal antitrust conspiracies, each with a competing manufacturer of generic drugs and various executives.     The Antitrust Division also announced a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) resolving the charges against Taro U.S.A., under which the company agreed to...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reportedly mulling deposing Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as it probes whether the social media giant violated antitrust laws. People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal and Fox Business that the FTC is mulling calling Zuckerberg and Sandberg, and that some top officials at Facebook are preparing for possible summons. However, the company appears focused on Zuckerberg’s appearance at the end of the month in front of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee where he and other top tech executives will testify. “We look forward to sharing...

Officials from the DOJ and some state attorneys general are reportedly set to meet on Friday to discuss an antitrust probe of Google. Reuters reports that U.S. Justice Department officials and some state attorneys general have set a meeting for Friday to discuss an antitrust probe of Google. The federal government and nearly all state attorneys general have now opened investigations into allegations that Google has broken antitrust laws. The federal probe is focusing heavily on search bias, advertising and Google’s Android mobile operating system. Breitbart News reported in November of 2019 that the attorneys general which are representing 48...

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the Securities and Exchange Commission have signed an interagency Memorandum of Understanding (“MOU”) to foster cooperation and communication between the agencies with the aim of enhancing competition in the securities industry. Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Antitrust Division announced the first-ever MOU between the Antitrust Division and the SEC, which was executed with SEC Chairman Jay Clayton before a discussion on equity market structure hosted by MIT’s Golub Center for Finance and Policy this afternoon.“The Antitrust Division and the SEC have prioritized close cooperation with one another in recent years...

NBC News reporter Adele-Momoko Fraser thanked two foreign non-profit organizations for their “collaboration” in urging Google to demonetize The Federalist, a respected conservative American news website, on Tuesday. NEW — from @NBC_VC. Thanks to @SFFakeNews and @CCDHate for their hard work and collaboration! https://t.co/dorhdZy1t1 — Adele-Momoko Fraser (@AMFraserNBC) June 16, 2020 The Federalist is a conservative news and opinion site that features, among others, Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway. Zero Hedge, another site targeted by the groups, is a blog featuring commentary on politics and economics. Fraser broke the story that Google allegedly “banned two far-right [sic] websites from its...

LONDON — European Union officials are preparing to bring antitrust charges against Amazon for abusing its dominance in internet commerce to box out smaller rivals, according to people with knowledge of the case. Nearly two years in the making, the case is one of the most aggressive attempts by a government to crimp the power of the e-commerce giant, which has largely sidestepped regulation throughout its 26-year history. The European Union regulators, who already have a reputation as the world’s most aggressive watchdogs of the technology industry, have determined that Amazon is stifling competition by unfairly using data collected from...

The case may be joined by state attorneys general in what would be one of the biggest antitrust actions by the United States since the late 1990s. WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is planning to file antitrust charges against Google as early as this summer, said two people with knowledge of the situation, in what would be one of the biggest antitrust actions by the United States since the late 1990s. The Justice Department is still investigating the internet company and has been making progress on its case, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the...

For years now, we have heard the urban legends about Amazon’s rise to power. Back in the 1990s, a visionary Jeff Bezos saw the potential in selling books on the Internet, drove cross-country with his wife, found a warehouse in Seattle, hooked it up to a modem, and the rest is a great American success story. Along the way, the company expanded its platform beyond book retail to everything retail and grew a successful cloud computing platform to boot. Today, Amazon and Bezos are rightly lauded for their business acumen and relentless customer focus. Bezos grew to be so personally...