Google is currently facing anti-trust scrutiny for introducing a new internet protocol that would give the company an unfair advantage. Though Google claims that its intentions are pure and solely aimed to improve internet privacy.

To find out Google’s objectives, the US House Judiciary Committee is investigating why the tech giant is implementing DNS-over-HTTPS in Chrome – which according to Google will improve internet privacy and security by encryption.

Google will test the new protocol next month, with users of its Chrome browser.

The media reports further say that investigators fear this would give the company – Google- an unfair advantage by denying access to users’ data.

The House has also sent a letter to Google, seeking the answer if the tech giant would use data handled via new Internet protocol for commercial purposes.

Defending the company’s new plan, one of the company spokesperson quotes, “Google has no plans to centralise or change people’s DNS providers to Google by default. Any claim that we are trying to become the centralised encrypted DNS provider is inaccurate.”

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Has Google been under Scrutiny before?

Google has gone through such scrutiny before and considering its dominance, it is normal for a tech giant. The antitrust regular of the European Union in March (2019), fined Google EUR 1.49 billion ($1.7 billion) for abusing its dominance in the online search market by blocking rivals.

Furthermore, the US Department of Justice in June also reported that it was preparing to open a case against Google for anti-trust violations.

Why DNS-over-HTTPS

Protecting user’s privacy is a top priority of every small and big company today. Trust is the thing that keeps customer connected, and once this trust is broken, nothing can fix it. In the case of DNS-over-HTTPS, lawmakers only worry that the new standard could alter internet competition.

DNS-over-HTTPS would mean cable and wireless companies will lose valuable DNS data of their users while Google will gain an unfair advantage in user data.

The DNS increase user privacy and prevent manipulation of DNS data by passing it over an HTTPS connection. It can also prevent man-in-the-middle attacks in which users can run into a malicious IP address.