Google’s trial, Amazon’s FTC lawsuit, and the perils of the garbage internet.

Shopping for dog food shouldn’t be this hard. In suing Google, the DOJ and 11 states called the search engine the “unchallenged gateway to the internet” for billions of people and noted that, in order to reach them, “countless advertisers must pay a toll.” Similarly, the FTC and 17 states allege that Amazon degraded the quality of its services and “litters its storefront with pay-to-play This digital payola is how Google and Amazon cash in on their dominance, the government says, but it’s also how it’s made these services palpably worse for everyone. “Most antitrust enforcement is directed at the risk of higher prices to consumers, but with these two-sided platforms like Amazon or Google, consumers don’t pay a monetary price to access the platform,” said Bill Baer, a Brookings Institution fellow who served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division during the Obama administration. “The plaintiffs need to show that the firm not only possessed monopoly power but then used its monopoly power by excluding rivals to maintain it, extend it, or leverage it.” But as part of that argument, the government’s lawyers will try to demonstrate that although Google and Amazon may not be literally increasing prices for consumers, they’re abusing their market power by degrading the quality of their services. Baer, the former DOJ antitrust chief, says he’s become more and more frustrated by Amazon search results in recent years—both because of the Perhaps in a more roundabout way than if a monopolist raised prices on consumers, if the allegations are correct and Google and Amazon are creating a pay-to-play environment among sellers and advertisers, that could ultimately drive up their costs.