Editor's note: Bradley Blankenship is a Prague-based American journalist, political analyst and freelance reporter. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on October 20, adding serious pressure on the tech giant by saying that "nothing is off the table" – even a breakup.

Antitrust investigations into four major tech companies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, have been ongoing for over a year, but the timing of the lawsuit is politically charged given that U.S. President Donald Trump and prominent right-wing voices have accused Big Tech of muzzling conservative voices.

The lawsuit, joined by 11 states represented by a Republican attorney general, says, "absent a court order, Google will continue executing its anti-competitive strategy, crippling the competitive process, reducing consumer choice, and stifling innovation."

There is little doubt that companies such as Google are engaging in anti-competitive practices. According to government estimates, 90 percent of all general search engine queries in the U.S. and nearly 95 of those on mobile are operated by Google. However, this stranglehold is not just about the actual service that Google provides to users, which it surely dominates, but the raw material that it collects through user input, i.e. data.

Data is the new oil of the 21st century, and Google not only has the most of them but unmitigated access to it. In a nutshell, Google and other tech companies use their services as a front to collect data and feed their algorithms to tailor advertised content to users and manipulate user behavior toward interaction with this content. In this way, Google is not simply using its intellectual property grounds to capitalize on the market, but actually maintaining a monopoly over a resource – human behavior.

According to federal investigators, Google does not actually compete on the quality of its search results but instead banks on payments to phone makers. When asked why they don't just make their own phones to try and compete in the mobile phone market, Google has actually stated in the past that it's far more lucrative to sponsor the Android system, which allows them unfettered access to user data and pre-loads Google services on devices.

Google has already lost several court cases in the European Union and elsewhere over these anti-competitive practices, so there is absolutely every reason to believe the suit could hold up in court in the U.S. despite what Google calls a flawed case.

Despite being one of the most effective lobbying powers in the U.S. and the world, it's interesting to see how there is so much distrust against Big Tech across the political spectrum. According to a September poll by Data for Progress, 65 percent of American voters think the economic power held by Big Tech is a problem for the economy and 70 percent think they wield too much political power.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, with whom President Trump has little in common, has been one of the primary advocates for breaking up Big Tech and many of her Republican colleagues in the Senate have equal disdain for Big Tech.

The reason for this is that, despite the fact that Big Tech has useful services that have become so ubiquitous, the actual ways these companies function and make a profit are wildly unpopular and that's precisely why most people don't understand their business model.

People see the facade without understanding what's beneath the hood; for example, you might be amazed to see Amazon apparently breaking into new markets every other day that are seemingly unrelated and think Jeff Bezos has lost his wits but when you realize that it's not about products or services offered – but about collecting your data – you would see a very coherent picture.

This is why it's particularly dangerous to politicize this issue into a partisan sparring match – because Big Tech and the surveillance capitalism that it's created is a systemic problem not entirely dissimilar from the other endemic systemic problems in America. 

Getting hung up on the fact that Trump had a tweet pulled for saying things that verifiably endanger lives loses the real thrust of why companies like Google need to be reprimanded, even broken up.

I will note that Google's Eric Schmidt was famously close to former President Barack Obama and had an open door in the White House, and that Obama and his campaign embraced Big Tech. 

There was basically a revolving door between the Obama White House and Silicon Valley and it can't be denied. But both parties also use metadata to drive their political campaigns and whoever began the practice is really irrelevant at this point.

Of course, the history of U.S. technology runs parallel with the federal government, including the military and the various intelligence agencies, transcending partisan politics. 

The Trump administration is obviously not absolved – they are going to bat to defend American tech companies against regulation in Europe and have launched an anti-competitive battle against Chinese tech companies both domestically and internationally on unfounded grounds. 

The ways in which Big Tech has infiltrated our lives and is steering our behavior toward corporate profit is not a matter of Republicans versus Democrats, it's simply the way capitalism is developing in the 21st century.

Far from being inevitable, there are actions that can be taken now to limit the iron grip of these corporations on civil society if policymakers simply capitalize on the fact that Big Tech and its practices are widely distrusted by Americans. As such, it is utterly meaningless for anyone to frame the debate in partisan terms and could end up helping these companies avoid accountability.

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