*By Christian Smith*
A regulatory crackdown on behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook is more likely than ever, according to Brian McCullough, author of "How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone."
"That's where the money is, and that's where the power is," McCullough said Thursday in an interview on Cheddar. "It's inevitable that governments are going to start looking at too much power concentrated in one sector."
In recent months, Facebook ($FB) and its peers have come under fire from regulators in Europe over issues of data privacy. On Thursday, the United Kingdom's data watchdog fined Facebook £500,000 (just over $640,000) over a breach of user data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
So far, European agencies have been the only groups to enact significant regulations on internet companies ー the primary example being the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires companies to disclose exactly what data they are collecting and gives users more control over their own information.
While Facebook has taken the most aggressive punches from critics over issues of data privacy, McCullough thinks Google's parent company Alphabet ($GOOGL) is the most likely to be implicated by anti-trust laws ー if the U.S. were to impose restrictions, that is.
"Even though Facebook gets all of the headlines, nobody hoovers up your data more than Google does," McCullough said.
Some candidates in this year's midterm primaries like Zephyr Teachout ー who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for New York State Attorney General ー have floated the idea of investigating companies like Alphabet and Facebook for antitrust infractions, but no such initiative has taken shape.
"How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone" is available in stores and online.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/the-day-of-reckoning-is-coming-for-big-internet-companies).
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