Google has almost 90% of the global search engine market. Gmail is the second most used email service after Hotmail. Google’s mobile software, Android, has 76% of the smartphone market. Google-owned YouTube is the overwhemingly the worlds largest online video company. Google itself is by far and away the biggest online avertising company in the world, with revenue of over $45 billion last year. It is working on driverless cars and has the money to make them when they are ready to do so.
The EU is now challenging this monopolistic situation. Only the EU and the US have the clout to do so. The founders of Google make big play about doing good in the world and doing no harm, but arguably, while they supply us with valuable technology they are, nonetheless, monopolists. Do we support the power it gives to a single company or do we rein it in (is that actually feasible?) and forego the undoubted intriguing technologies Google has up its sleeve?
Comment
Last night there was a news item about Google taking huge numbet of stored satellite images, never before used, and ordering them and organising them so that they can plot the incidence of disease in Africa or the rate of shrinking of lakes in the Western States and similar issues.
The reason why I, like many people, use Google’s products is because they were good. If their products were bad, no one would use them. Google does not have a ‘monopoly’ as such, their are many competitors to all of their services. But people just choose not to use them. It would be wrong for the EU to penalise a company for being successful. Particularly in technology, starting a competing service is cheap and easy, so any chance of Google leveraging an unfair monopoly is virtually non existent.
There are overwhelming statistics but Google is one manifestation of an even more basic problem than whether or not it’s monopolistic. In a democracy the core issue is this: power MUST be accountable to the public weal. Somehow.
The internet itself was a government asset from which Google emerged. Given that most of the regulatory agencies have been deliberately emasculated and that political candidates are bought with money from fake people (i.e., corporations) how can accountability be enforced? I don’t know but I know we have to try–and maybe the Europeans can make a contribution to that effort. And, while they’re at it, may they divorce themselves from American foreign policies as well as economic damage from monopolies.