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    Google Monopoly Ruling

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    Google Monopoly Ruling

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    lara9p
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    8 views2 pages

    Google Monopoly Ruling

    Uploaded by

    lara9p
    Ok

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
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    Google monopoly ruling: where the tech giant goes from here

    Published: August 15, 2024

    A US judge has found that Google is a monopoly and has used this dominance to reinforce its
    market position.
    This ruling, which is subject to appeal, brings the US regulator close to the European
    Commission in its approach to tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Amazon. Regulators
    now agree that the nature of these companies’ business means that the market ends up
    becoming a monopoly dominated by one massive company.
    It has thus become the job of the state to protect consumers from tech giants consolidating
    their dominance. As a company, 80% of Alphabet’s (Google’s owner) revenue, comes from
    advertising, a total of US$146 billion (£114 billion) in 2021. Almost everything the company
    does must be understood through this lens.
    The main source of Google’s advertising income derives from its 90% market share of the
    market for general search engines, one of the oldest and most important services on the
    internet.
    To provide users with answers ranging from the best recipe for an apple pie to a
    recommendation for a new vacuum cleaner, Google first gathers information about every
    page available on the Internet. Then, it uses its database of websites, the keywords used for
    search, what other people typically liked as an answer to similar queries, but also everything
    it knows about you, to rank possible answers.
    Businesses then pay for the right for their own text to be prominently displayed alongside
    genuine search results. A higher quality of search results means more customers, which
    makes it easier to attract advertisers. It also means the advert can be tailored to consumer
    tastes and is therefore more valuable to advertisers.
    While research has shown the actual return on investment to businesses from digital
    advertising is unclear, and sometimes even negative, search advertising remains in high
    demand. It constitutes 66% of Google’s revenue and growth in the past decade.
    Other services such as Google Maps and YouTube also contribute. For a start they also
    generate advertising revenue. But they also provide even more information to help tailor
    search ads. This includes how much time a user spends on a page, what they click on,
    whether they react positively or negatively to a result, where they are physically and how
    they travelled there.
    All this information about you is stored and serves a single purpose. It builds a highly
    detailed profile of you as a consumer that has enormous value to advertisers looking to
    personalise ads directly for you.
    In order to gather all this valuable data, it’s vital for Google that it retains that market
    dominance. Google reportedly spends more than US$26 billion each year to ensure it comes
    up as the default search engine for the highest number of users.
    Default provider
    On any Android or Apple phone, the default is Google search representing a market share of
    94.9%. Google is also the default on almost every web browser. And research shows that
    even if the cost of switching to another search engine is small, the default position leads to a
    vicious circle. When consumers stick to the default, it means the possible alternative does
    not have enough consumer data to offer a high quality search, or to be attractive to
    advertisers.
    Google spends US$8.4 billion a year to operate its search engine – on top of the fortune it
    already spends on ensuring it remains the default search engine. Today, Microsoft’s Bing is
    the only search engine truly competing with Google by spending billions to index the whole
    world wide web.

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