A Sept. 19 Yahoo Finance story looks at the Department of Justice’s current antitrust case against Google through the lens of the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s.
AT&T “was the telephone company for decades just as Google essentially is the choice for most Americans navigating the internet,” according to the article. And one of the federal prosecutors responsible for the lawsuit that led to AT&T’s breakup told Yahoo Finance that the DOJ probably has a “50%-plus chance” of prevailing today against Google.
But Partner Carl Hittinger, also interviewed for the article, noted that AT&T’s breakup had significant negative impacts and said such breakups “should not be the automatic remedy when anticompetitive conduct is found.” Such thinking “sometimes gets carried away,” and the result “is not always good for the public or society,” he said.
