Yeah its a politic war. I believe it all started when some people on the left got some companies to pull their ads from some right wing Fox anchor. Unless someone knows of events older than this?
The earliest notable one I can think of is the whole Kellogs and Breitbart incident. However, specifically relating to Google, I'd say it's the James Damore political silencing by Google. And even more recently, Youtube has started censoring controversial videos and putting them inside a "gimped" version of Youtube. I.e. no likes/shares/related videos. It really is turning into a 1984 scenario.