Never before has a single entity had so much control over so much information as Google does today. The threat it poses to democracy is unprecedented, and the methods it has used to attain that power are at best unfair and perhaps illegal. The people need to take power back from Big Tech, and the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is the best hope to start doing so.

Google was just one-tenth of its current size when it bought an online advertising company called DoubleClick in 2007. At the time, DoubleClick acted as a middleman between advertisers who wanted to buy online space, and publishers, such as the Washington Examiner, who wanted to sell it. Google had always made money selling advertisements on its own search engine, but it wanted to leverage its market power in search, and video market power via YouTube, to become the dominant middleman in all of online advertising.