What a Google Breakup Would Mean for Travel
There has been a flurry a legislative activity in the U.S. in the past few days to stop Google and other big tech firms from using their market power to self-promote their own products, and to break up Google’s advertising businesses, but their outcome is uncertain, and the potential impact would be extremely complex to gauge.
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, who’s the majority leader, plans on getting a Senate vote by summer on bipartisan legislation that would thwart Google’s practice of self-preferencing its own products such as its Google Travel advertising business, which includes flights, hotels, vacation rentals, and tours and activities, Axios reported Friday. The New York Senator is trying to run the clock out on the mid-term elections and all of the tumult that they could bring.
A day earlier, Axios reported that four U.S. Senators — two from each party, including conservative firebrand Ted Cruz of Texas and moderate Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — introduced a bill that would break up the advertising services that Google offers to enable third-party websites to monetize ads and help advertisers run campaigns across the Web.
One bill would curb Google’s bias toward its own businesses, such as when it places hotel listings with photos, maps and rates in a prominent box in search results that are higher than all other relatively vanilla free listings from online travel agency rivals. The bill would be more consequential for the travel industry than would the advertising tech bill. The latter could lead to Google being forced to divest some of the ad tech services it provides that enable skincare or washing machine retailers to advertise their products on Today.com, for example.
Facebook, too, could potentially see its advertising businesses shorn of their power if the ad tech breakup bill eventually becomes law.
