Google’s Monopoly
In today’s world, the internet gives the average person an incredible amount of information at their fingertips. According to Fabio Duarte, in 2022 there were 97 zettabytes of data on the internet. For scale one zettabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 gigabytes. Obviously with all that data you would need a tool to find the data that you actually want. There are many different search engines that have existed since the creation of the internet, but nowadays there is one that obviously dominates. The indisputable most-used search engine is Google Chrome. However, this also brings up the question, is Google's dominance a good thing?
Starting at the beginning, in 1995 Larry Page and Sergery Brin met and began work on Google. A little later Andy Bechtolscheim donated $100,000 to “Google Inc.” which was the big breakthrough they needed.
Interestingly enough Larry and Sergery came pretty close to selling multiple times in the 1990s. In 1999 Google had its official launch. The same year in 1999 Google opened its first office in Menlo Park, CA. Google’s mission at the time was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Google’s growth only continued on from there. Throughout the early 2000s Google also brought out many new products like Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Calendar, and many more. Nowadays, Google has nearly become a monopoly of search engines with pretty much every other search engine fading into obscurity.
Is this legal?
On the other hand, it’s not as if Google is doing anything specifically illegal. According to the New York Times, Google has been the most preferred browser since the 2000s. It is not as if Google is making anyone pick their site. They’ve become popular enough to become the default option. Advertisers also benefit from Google’s monopoly due to them being able to reach more people. We also get access to more content since pretty much all exclusive content is being funneled into Google.
The real question is how does Google’s dominance affect us? Google shares the same data collection that a lot of other websites use today. Google basically takes notes of everything you do and will then find a matching ad that a company paid them to show to you. In a way this means that the advertisers are the real customers.
If Google chooses to hike up prices or intensify the data collecting then there isn’t really anything anyone can do to stop them right now. As of right now there isn’t anything legally stopping them from doing so. There is also the concern of Google choosing which articles to give us. A good example of the problem is the presidential election. Imagine if Google decides that it won’t show all the articles that puts candidate #1 in a bad light and did show all the ones that threw mud at candidate #2. There are at least 8.5 billion google searches every day. The potential ripple effect of this is huge. People already through a ruckus last year when Biden suddenly won the election. If people found out Google should favoritism, there might be another capital storming. The point I’m trying to make is that Google has a lot of power and there aren’t any laws directly stopping them from doing some potentially harmful things.
In conclusion, Google is in a very important position right now. They have dominance in an area that millions of people rely on. This gives Google a whole lot of power, which so far has been used for good. However, there is nothing stopping them from changing that. Should Google have restrictions put on it, or should it be allowed to continue as is?
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