© House Judiciary Committee/YouTube Facebook's Monika Bickert gives evidence to the House Judiciary Committee. House Judiciary Committee/YouTube

Freedom From Facebook's campaign to break up the social network has drawn much attention over the past two years. Now it's coming for Google.

The coalition wants to challenge Google's monopoly on advertising and media, and plans to push for more investigations into the company's practices.

'You have this massive pandemic which is a great opportunity for both of these corporations to engage in a huge PR effort,' the coalition's spokesperson told Business Insider.

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During Facebook's Congressional hearing in 2018, as the company's head of global policy management Monika Bickert took the witness stand, several members of the crowd held up signs depicting Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as a two-headed octopus. As was soon revealed, these protestors were part of the Freedom From Facebook group, a coalition formed to fight the social network's increasing monopoly.

Two years later, that same group is rebranding to the Freedom From Facebook And Google coalition, and adding six new groups to its cohort as it expands its scope.

"Google and Facebook enjoy extraordinary market power, with users firmly locked into their services," wrote the American Economic Liberties Project, one member of the coalition, in a white paper distributed last week. "Today, Google has eight products with more than a billion users each, and Facebook has four products with more than a billion users each. Acquisitions have allowed these two corporations to control the richest and widest data sets on human populations ever assembled."

The coalition, which is formed of several groups including Communication Workers of America, Jewish Voice for Peace, MoveOn Civic Action, and Demand Progress, has laid out a variety of goals. The biggest are the ones you might expect: to have both companies' online advertising strategies more closely investigated, ban most forms of ad targeting, have Facebook and Google regulated as content publishers, push back against company lobbying – and of course, break them up.

"People are kind of primed now, because they understand Facebook, to also understand Google," said Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, and spokesperson for Freedom From Facebook And Google.

Miller, a former Treasury Department aide, told Business Insider that the Cambridge Analytica scandal that rocked Facebook proved to be a powerful way for the coalition to build its case against the social network and capture public attention.

The group believes attitudes and understandings on Capitol Hill have changed enough since then to launch an influential campaign against Google.

"It's been a huge incredibly rapid change from having no idea that these institutions are problems, to what do we do about them? Not whether, not when, but what? And who is going to be the one to do that?" said Miller.

Beyond gate-crashing Capitol Hill, the coalition has pulled other attention-grabbing stunts which have ranged from taking out a full-page advertisement in the student newspaper when Sheryl Sandberg spoke at MIT in June 2018, to flying a plane carrying a banner that read "You Broke Democracy" over a Facebook shareholder meeting.

But its biggest moment came in a bombshell New York Times report revealing Facebook had commissioned consulting firm Definers Public Affairs to try to link efforts by Freedom from Facebook to philanthropist George Soros – a move that was criticized as being anti-Semitic. In response, Facebook said that accusation was "reprehensible and untrue."

Miller counts this moment as a "self-inflicted" win for the coalition. "That created a lot of concern among policy makers and was really a big mistake on their part," she told Business Insider.

Beyond working with policy makers, Miller wouldn't reveal much about how the group will take the fight to Google, but did point to a growing number of instances of employees protesting some of the company's practices who might engage with the coalition.

"Something you've seen over the last two years is a far more engaged cohort of employees," said Miller. We're thinking strategically about how you engage with the people who make those companies run and make those companies profitable, but are maybe not comfortable with the role their corporations and leadership are playing in our society."

The coalition says that its biggest priority is to persuade the FTC to conduct a section 6(b) investigation, which would see it delve into the finer details of the online advertising and media industry. "We do want to center the problem very squarely around monopoly and business model to make sure we don't slap on easy band-aids," said Miller.

"There are areas of concern that are evergreen, and one of them is that they have a monopoly over digital advertising that is harvesting revenue away from legitimate sources of news and journalism, and that information is a foundation for democratically accountability."

The group is also closely watching Google's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which it makes loud and clear at the top of its rebranded website.

"You have this massive pandemic which is a great opportunity for both of these corporations to engage in a huge PR effort, and put their charity forward," said Miller. "I think at this point there's a sense that that's great, but that's what governments should be doing as well."

'This isn't something you can fix in an emergency'

Big tech has been uncharacteristically proactive during the pandemic. For example, Google's sister company Verily has been expanding its testing facilities and screening service, with more than 7,000 people now tested, as Business Insider reported this week. Meanwhile, Google and Apple announced an unprecedented partnership on a covid-tracing technology that will soon be deployed.

But there is an argument to be made that some of these moves have come out of necessity, rather than opportunity, as a response to wider structural shortcomings. As Business Insider's Rob Price wrote, Google's and Apple's partnership is a good start, but it's let down by America's testing failures.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has also acknowledged that there should be limits to big tech's role in the pandemic, and that it was up to governments and health officials to lead the response.

"There is no easy answer," said Miller in response to whether tech companies should be so involved. "The question is, who is in the driver seat? Is it democratically elected representatives of the people, or is it massively powerful CEOs whose ultimate interest isn't necessarily the preservation of the small business sector in the United States, or the preservation of useful healthcare data in a way that isn't abusive or coercive?

"This isn't something you can fix in an emergency because government institutions have really decayed, and that's a project that hopefully the next administration will hopefully change and reverse."

Yet even Google is feeling the effects of the pandemic. The company could be about to see its revenue shrink for the first time ever, and this week announced that it would slow down hiring for the remainder of 2020.

Meanwhile, it looks like the pandemic hasn't put the brakes on antitrust investigations into either Facebook or Google, even if it might have slowed them. Google is already under investigation by the Department of Justice, which extends across search, Android, ads, and other parts of the business.

Probes are ongoing with Facebook too, and a spokesperson for New York Attorney General Letitia James told Protocol that priorities "hadn't changed" despite the pandemic. Even Google's acquisition of Fitbit is still being closely looked at.

The Freedom From Facebook And Google coalition told Business Insider it is "completely funded" through foundations, and that it does not accept any corporate money. But it is also a relatively small operation, and according to Miller it will be focusing its attention primarily "on policy makers who have authority to make the changes."

"I don't necessarily think you need a massive grassroots movement against these corporations," said Miller. "I think you still do see policy makers grappling in real ways with the various challenges they present in society and making their best efforts to wrap their minds around that and develop a strategy.

"You are going up against a sector with massive amount of political influence and infinite amounts of money, and that is always going to play a role. But you've seen a diverse range of actors across the partisan spectrum step out of the precipice here and I think our job is to guide that leadership into something that turns into policy."

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