Staff Editorial
According to Google, it fields some 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. Compare that to the 500,000 it got its first year in business in 1998.
But, as noted in the article “Information is power,” from The Guardian, if poor quality information is widespread, it can have real-world consequences.
Emblematic of this issue is the fact that Google often bumps Alt-Right or conspiracy theory sites to the top of its news tab. In Europe, 90 percent of searches are also through Google and the information it holds on users is another concern of researchers and members of the European Union.
Ten years ago, the top five companies in the world were Exxon Mobil, General Electric,Microsoft, Citigroup, and Bank of America. Today, they are Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Except for one, technology corporations dominate the world.
The New York Times estimates that that these five companies are “natural monopolies,” no different fr4om the early 20th century when AT&T bought up all the small companies with previously established phone wires. By becoming the only option for consumers, AT&T had a natural monopoly on phone service.
Like the early AT&T, today’s tech giants have little competition. Facebook and its subsidiaries — Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp — control 77 percent of mobile social traffic Seventy-four percent the e-book space is owned by Amazon. Finally, and most alarmingly, Google’s market share in search advertising is a whopping 88 percent.
It is time to take action to limit Google’s technological power and influence over the Internet and its global audience.
One way to limit Google’s monopoly would be to treat the company as a public good, as was done with AT&T in the mid-1950s. AT&T had regulations put in place by the government that kept rates reasonable and some of their profits were earmarked for research and development in the sciences. The government allowed it to maintain a monopoly as long as all “Past patents were licensed to any American company royalty-free, and all future patents were to be licensed for a small fee,” wrote the New York Times last year. The creation of Texas Instruments and Motorola, for example, are a result of this 1956 agreement.
Another way to limit Google is to restrict its acquisitions. The company already has DoubleClick and YouTube in its portfolio, but it could be blocked from acquiring large firms such as Spotify or Snapchat.
Due to a clause in the Digital Millennium Act of 1998, Google, through its company YouTube, can free ride on the content of others. YouTube’s product is created by its users and the company is not responsible for the content uploaded to the network. Google earns ad revenue from videos that are often unpoliced and sometimes inappropriate. If this were removed from the Act, Google and other Internet monoliths would be required to take responsibility for the content they host.
While Google’s dominance on the Internet is in many ways different from AT&T’s in the phone space, it still shows the characteristics of a public good. The two key features of a public good are that it is nonrival and nonexcludable. To be nonrival, a good can be consumed without reducing the amount that is available for others. When a good is nonexcludable, it is not possible to provide a good for one person and not for others.
Google is not better than most other search engines, yet it retains nearly the entire search market due to first mover advantage. In other words, Google was slightly better than the competition at the time of the Internet boom. Since day one, Microsoft’s Bing has barely made a dent in the market after years and years of advertising itself. To “google” quickly became a verb, making it even harder for others to break into the space.
It is difficult in today’s world to avoid the grasp of technology and Google is available on virtually every device, if not built into the software. As it expands its reach even farther and buys up more of the market, Google will only become larger and harder to regulate as time passes and its natural monopoly strengthens.
There is still time to act and prevent further damage before it is too late. Senator Mark Warner insisted last month he has a good relationship with Google and wants its CEO to testify before Congress.