No matter what your personal feelings are about this, they are facing headwinds and scrutiny over this and Search advertising is still what brings in most of their profits.
No matter what your personal feelings are about this, they are facing headwinds and scrutiny over this and Search advertising is still what brings in most of their profits.
Hopefully, they continue to resist. It will be bad if they suck it up, get in line, and start paying lobbyists to both sides.
Interestingly, before the Microsoft lawsuit there was no tech lobbying. The lesson learned by MS and others is that they have to spend a lot of money on DC.
For example, in 98 MS spent $4M. By 03, this was up to almost $9M. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...
The only way to survive political scrutiny in a two-party system is to support both sides, or at least have a plausible threat that you could support the other side if over-regulated.