What Does the U.S. Think about Tech Regulation?

51 percent of U.S. adults surveyed by Pew Research Center in February 2024 desired stronger regulation of big tech companies like Meta, Alphabet or Amazon, while only 16 percent said they wanted less regulation. This marks a return to 2018 levels for pro-regulation respondents after said share had dropped to 44 percent two years prior.

This increase in survey participants wishing for sturdier regulatory barriers for tech companies is potentially related to controversies surrounding generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. These chatbots are largely trained on publicly available data, often without users' or platform holders' explicit consent. However, the Pew survey doesn't provide further details on the reasoning behind the call for stronger regulation.

Even though the AI landscape in particular faces no real regulatory hurdles and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) continually file complaints against big tech for allegedly breaking anti-competition laws, 31 percent of survey respondents in 2024 said that regulation should stay the same as it currently is.

Developments in three major antitrust cases in the U.S. tech sector have garnered significant public interest in 2024. The DOJ together with 16 states filed an official complaint against Apple in March. This complaint claimed the company currently best known for selling smartphones and laptops abused its market standing to make switching to other brands more difficult than needed, essentially creating a "walled garden" ecosystem.

The other two cases both concern Alphabet's search engine Google. An official complaint by the DOJ lodged in 2020 alleged that Google became a monopolist in the online search segment, partly due to deals to set the search engine as default on browsers and devices. In 2023, the case went to trial and Google was found guilty of breaking anti-competition laws approximately one year later on August 5, 2024. Judge Amit Mehta plans to announce the remedies to be undertaken by Google to restore competition in the summer of 2025.

Another antitrust case involving Google, concerning the alleged establishment of an unlawful online advertising monopoly, had its first hearing on September 9 after the DoJ filed a complaint in 2023. In the past year alone, Google's parent company Alphabet generated $238 billion in advertising revenue, while competitors only earned a fraction of this sum.