Opinion: Google Has Become Too Powerful for Democracy to Ignore

By Cliff Potts | WPS News Opinion

BAYBAY CITY, LEYTE, Philippines, August 3, 2026 — 0005 PhST

The question is no longer whether Google has become one of the most influential corporations in human history. That question has already been answered.

The real question is whether any democratic society should permit a single private corporation to exercise such sweeping control over how information is discovered, distributed, monetized, and preserved.

Google is no longer merely a search engine.

Through its parent company, Alphabet, Google controls the world’s dominant search platform, YouTube, the Android operating system, the Google Play Store, one of the largest digital-advertising operations in existence, the Chrome browser, major artificial-intelligence systems, mapping services, analytics, cloud infrastructure, and an extraordinary volume of information about its users.

Each of those operations is powerful on its own.

Combined under one corporate roof, they create a digital ecosystem capable of influencing who is found, who earns money, which businesses reach customers, which applications succeed, which publishers remain visible, and which voices effectively disappear.

That ownership structure creates the opportunity for abuse.

Google Search can reinforce Google advertising. Android can reinforce Google Search. Chrome can reinforce both. The Play Store can dictate the terms under which software developers reach mobile users. YouTube can determine which videos are recommended, which channels qualify for advertising revenue, and which publishers lose practical access to audiences they spent years building.

None of this requires a secret meeting in which executives decide to destroy one particular publisher.

A recommendation system can quietly stop recommending a channel. A search-ranking adjustment can bury a publication. An automated advertising classification can eliminate revenue. An account restriction can remove years of accumulated work.

The person or organization affected may receive little more than a generic notice—or no useful explanation at all.

That is an unacceptable amount of unaccountable power.

Breaking Up Google Is Not a Fringe Proposal

Calls for structural action against Google are not confined to activists, angry creators, or small publishers.

In 2024, a federal court found that Google had illegally maintained monopolies in general search services and general search-text advertising. During the remedies phase, the United States Department of Justice proposed measures that included forcing Google to divest Chrome and restricting its use of Android and other products to protect its search dominance.

The court ultimately rejected the proposed Chrome divestiture. Its final judgment instead prohibited certain exclusive distribution contracts, required Google to provide qualifying competitors with access to specified search and user-interaction data, ordered syndication opportunities for search results and advertising, and established continuing technical oversight.

Those remedies were significant, but the court’s decision not to order a breakup does not make structural separation an unreasonable idea. It confirms that divestiture was seriously proposed, litigated, and considered within an actual federal antitrust case—not invented in an internet comment section.

The Justice Department has also won a separate case in which a federal court found that Google unlawfully monopolized important parts of the open-web digital-advertising market. According to the Justice Department, Google’s conduct harmed publishers, competition, and ultimately the consumers who depend upon information distributed across the open web.

That finding should matter greatly to every independent news organization.

A company that controls advertising technology while also operating competing services does not occupy the position of a neutral intermediary. It participates in the same market it helps govern.

Google disputes allegations against it and continues exercising its legal rights in court. It is entitled to do so.

The public is equally entitled to question whether the company should continue controlling so many interconnected layers of the digital economy.

Europe Already Calls Alphabet a Gatekeeper

The European Union has formally designated Alphabet a digital “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act.

The designation covers core services including Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, YouTube, Android, Chrome, and Alphabet’s online-advertising operations.

The term is appropriate.

These services do not merely compete within digital markets. They frequently determine how other businesses enter those markets, find customers, collect revenue, and survive.

The Digital Markets Act attempts to address that power before another decade-long competition case reaches its conclusion. Instead of relying exclusively upon punishment after damage has occurred, it places advance obligations and prohibitions upon companies possessing entrenched control over essential digital services.

That approach recognizes a basic problem with ordinary antitrust enforcement: by the time a case is investigated, tried, appealed, and remedied, smaller competitors may already be gone.

A fine imposed years later does not restore a publication that closed, a developer who abandoned an application, or a creator whose audience disappeared.

When financial penalties become routine operating expenses, governments must move beyond fines and consider structural remedies.

The Transparency Failure

I cannot honestly claim, without reliable supporting data, that most political creators affected by demonetization or reduced distribution are left-wing, progressive, or pro-democracy publishers.

Progressive creators have accused YouTube of unequal treatment.

Conservative creators have made the opposite accusation.

The available public information does not establish which political group experiences the greatest overall harm.

That absence of evidence does not clear YouTube.

It exposes the transparency problem.

Independent researchers cannot adequately determine whether YouTube’s enforcement is politically neutral because the company does not disclose enough channel-level information about recommendation reductions, monetization classifications, automated decisions, reversals, comparative enforcement, and the practical effects of its algorithms.

YouTube publishes extensive rules governing monetization and advertiser-friendly content. Those policies describe broad categories of material that may receive limited advertising or no advertising.

They do not necessarily tell an individual publisher why views dropped from thousands to hundreds and then to tens.

They do not reveal whether a channel stopped appearing in recommendations.

They do not explain whether an automated system changed its classification of the channel.

They do not demonstrate whether politically comparable channels received comparable treatment.

They do not provide the public with enough information to audit a system that helps determine what billions of people see.

That is the issue.

A system does not need to ban political speech outright to diminish it. It can simply stop showing that speech to people.

I Have Watched the Audience Disappear

This is not an abstract concern for me.

I have watched my own work receive thousands of views, then hundreds, and eventually numbers in the tens. That decline occurred while the company controlling distribution provided no intelligible explanation of what changed.

I cannot prove in a courtroom that Google or YouTube politically targeted Cliff Potts.

I can prove that an opaque, Google-owned system possessed the practical ability to withdraw access to an audience without explaining itself in any meaningful way.

That alone is a democratic problem.

It is also an antitrust problem.

Journalism, political commentary, music, education, and public advocacy increasingly depend upon privately operated systems that can alter distribution without notice. Publishers may technically remain free to speak while being denied any realistic opportunity to be heard.

Freedom of speech is not a legal guarantee of an audience.

But when one corporation has acquired extraordinary control over whether an audience can find that speech, elected governments have every right to investigate how that power is being exercised.

Break Apart the Conflicting Functions

The answer is not another vague request that YouTube “do better.”

The ownership structure itself must be examined.

Search should not reinforce advertising.

Advertising should not reinforce YouTube.

Android should not reinforce Search.

The Play Store should not reinforce every other Google business.

Chrome should not function as another mechanism for protecting Google’s position.

Artificial intelligence should not be allowed to absorb information from independent publishers, answer users directly, and then deprive the original publishers of the traffic required to survive.

Conflicting business functions should be separated.

Self-preferencing should be prohibited.

Recommendation and monetization systems should be independently audited.

Publishers and creators should receive meaningful explanations when distribution or revenue is materially restricted.

Appeals should be decided by accountable human reviewers rather than disappearing into another automated system.

Regulators should have access to the records necessary to determine whether enforcement is consistent, discriminatory, anticompetitive, or politically uneven.

Independent researchers should be permitted to study the effects of recommendation systems without depending entirely upon information selected and released by the company being examined.

When fines fail to change conduct, structural separation should remain available.

These are not attacks upon innovation.

They are protections against concentrated power.

Democratic societies regulate utilities, financial institutions, telecommunications systems, transportation networks, and other industries capable of affecting the public at enormous scale.

They should not exempt the corporations governing digital discovery merely because their control is exercised through algorithms instead of physical gates.

No private company should possess the practical ability to determine who is discovered, who is heard, who earns a living, and who quietly disappears from public view without meaningful explanation or independent oversight.

Google has become too powerful for democracy to ignore.

The only remaining question is whether democratic governments will act before that power becomes permanent.

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Sources

U.S. Department of Justice: Department of Justice Prevails in Landmark Antitrust Case Against Google

U.S. Department of Justice: Department of Justice Wins Significant Remedies Against Google

U.S. Department of Justice: United States and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC

European Commission: Digital Markets Act Designated Gatekeepers

European Commission: The Digital Markets Act

YouTube: Channel Monetization Policies

YouTube: What Kind of Content Can I Monetize?

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