The Justice Department could file an antitrust suit against Google (and YouTube) parent Alphabet as soon as this month, according to The New York Times.

Google's market power and position as the dominant search engine have drawn record fines in Europe, but it has pretty much avoided similar treatment at home. 

RELATED: DOJ's Delrahim Seeks Examples of Online Platform Anticompetitive Conduct

Attorney General Bill Barr signaled at his Senate confirmation hearing that if he got the job he wanted to investigate Big Tech and how it got that way "under the nose of antitrust enforcers." The Times reported that Barr was pushing Justice to file by month's end, while others in the department were suggesting they needed more time to build their case.

President Donald Trump and the Justice Department separately have set their sites on regulating content on social media platforms as Silicon Valley draws unprecedented attention from Washington to match its unprecedented market caps and power over information. 

At a July 29 House Judiciary Committee hearing on whether Google and other giant edge providers are using their power anticompetitively, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google is in a long tradition of American innovation, "building products that are helpful to American users in moments big and small." He talked about small businesses using Google to grow. 

As to whether Google is dominant, he said: "Google operates in highly competitive and dynamic global markets, in which prices are free or falling, and products are constantly improving. … People have more ways to search for information than ever before — and increasingly this is happening outside the context of only a search engine." he asserted.

It looks like the Justice Department does not see it that way.

FCC chair Ajit Pai has some advice for legislators preparing for a Sept. 5 hearing with some of the edge's biggest players, including Amazon and Twitter: Get some answers on allegations of social media sites censoring conservative speech, and seriously consider applying transparency rules about how they conduct their business similar to those the FCC has imposed on ISPs.

Related: Pai Says Twitter is Bigger Threat to Open Net Than ISPs

That came in a blog post from the chairman on the eve of that hearing in the Senate Intelligence Committee on Foreign Influence Operations' Use of Social Media Platforms.

Related: Google's Page Only 'Maybe' for Senate Hearing

The chairman said he was not calling for the kind of utility-style regulations that his FCC has just removed from ISPs, especially since he said those companies can make "certain business judgments about content on their sites."

But he did say that "we need to seriously think about whether the time has come for these companies to abide by new transparency obligations. After all, just as is the case with respect to broadband providers, consumers need accurate information in order to make educated choices about whether and how to use these tech giants’ platforms."

Pai posed his comments mostly in the form of questions, but it was not hard to divine his opinion on the subject. 

"Currently, the FCC imposes strict transparency requirements on companies that operate broadband networks — how they manage their networks, performance characteristics, and the like. Yet consumers have virtually no insight into similar business practices by tech giants. Do steps need to be taken to ensure that consumers receive more information about how these companies operate?"

He pointed out that "Tech giants have enormous and unprecedented insight into every part of our daily lives," and that he has already pointed out elsewhere that “recent experience shows that so-called edge providers are in fact deciding what content [we] see. These providers routinely block or discriminate against content they don’t like.”

Pai essentially summed up his point this way: "Are these tech giants running impartial digital platforms over which they don’t exercise editorial judgment when it comes to content? Or do they in fact decide what speech is allowed and what is not and discriminate based on ideology and/or political affiliation? And...where is the transparency?"

Pai said he hoped the hearings would help answer those questions, answers that will likely determine just how regulatory Washington becomes toward edge providers previously given something of a "garage innovators" pass from such scrutiny. 

Washington —The “Wild West” of unaccountable edge providers, whose white hats have been blackened of late, could be getting a new sheriff. Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and someone on a number of people’s shortlists to run against President Donald Trump in 2020, has begun to outline ramped-up government oversight of edge providers.

There has been a movement on Capitol Hill to shed the “garage innovator” rose-colored glasses that have left the Googles and Twitters of the world relatively free of the government minding that the “core” of the network — that would be internet service providers — has faced.

Sen. Ron Wyden (R-Ore.), author of the provision that gave edge providers a liability carveout for their content, said the days of shielding online platforms are over, and it’s time to unsheathe the sword.

Warner, a Virgina Democrat and former cellular industry executive, has drafted something of a game plan for regulating the edge in a white paper that makes its motive clear in the title: “Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms.”

While the paper says Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and others on the edge deserve kudos for their transformative tech, they also deserve “increased scrutiny.” Warner was helped toward that conclusion as one of the leaders of the investigation into Russian election interference and its use of social media, saying the probe has exposed “the dark underbelly of an entire ecosystem.”

Government has been either incapable or unwilling to address the impacts of troubling online trends on privacy, competition and the online public square, Warner said.

Warner said policymakers should focus on three major areas:

• The ability of communications tech to promote disinformation that undercuts trust in institutions, the press, markets and democracy itself.

• The ability of communications technology to track users online across multiple devices, aggregate their data and profile them (citing Facebook and Cambridge Analytica as an example of how that information could be used to target voters inappropriately.

• The dominance of the internet by a few edge giants “poses key problems for long-term competition and innovation across multiple markets, including digital advertising markets (which support much of the Internet economy), future markets driven by machine-learning and artificial intelligence, and communications technology markets.”

Warner does more than identify the problems. He offers a host of possible regulatory backstops, including:

• Creating an affirmative duty for online platforms to identify inauthentic accounts and report them to the Securities & Exchange Commission, advertisers and the public.

• Making platforms liable for not removing “deep fakes” or otherwise manipulated audio or video.

• “Legislation that guarantees that platforms above a certain size provide independent, public interest researchers with access to anonymized activity data.”

• New disclosure requirements for online political ads (Warner has introduced a bill, the Honest Ads Act, to that effect).

• Giving the FTC rulemaking authority over privacy and data protection.

• Requiring first parties to opt in to data collection and use.

There is more, but the thrust is clear. FAANG is on notice that D.C. policymakers are going to start showing some teeth, too, something ISPs have pushed for.

The FCC is not going to become a "do not track" enforcer.

The commission has dismissed a request by consumer watchdog groups to require edge providers -- such as Google, Facebook, Pandora, YouTube and Netflix -- to "honor 'Do Not Track' requests from consumers."

The chief of the Wireline Competition Bureau said in denying the request that "the Commission has been unequivocal in declaring that it has no intent to regulate edge providers."

The FCC did not apply many of the Title II regs to ISPs, but did decide to include the Sec. 222 CPNI protections, concluding that "broadband providers serve as a necessary conduit for information passing between an Internet user and Internet sites or other Internet users, and are in a position to obtain vast amounts of personal and proprietary information about their customers."

The FCC's CPNI protections were initially applied to phone service, migrated to video service and now to broadband. But the bureau signaled that would not extent to edge providers information collection.

When the FCC reclassified Internet access as a Title II common carrier service earlier this year, it also got authority to regulate customer proprietary network information (CPNI) for broadband service, just as it does for traditional MVPD service--phone and video--provided by those ISPs. CPNI is information that identifies a customer, not the content of the service.

The FCC has yet to come up with a regulatory regime for protecting broadband service CPN, which is part of a separate proceeding.

At the same time, the FCC said in its Open Internet order reclassifying Internet access under Title II that it was not regulating the Internet, per se, or any applications or content, saying Title II only applies to the transmission component.

The groups had said the FCC, in addition to coming up with those ISP CPNI regulations, the commission should also "promulgate rules protecting the authorized use of consumers’ personal information by requiring edge providers to honor ‘Do Not Track’ Requests."