Google’s monopoly money

19 August 2024

You probably Googled something today. And when you did, you probably didn’t make a conscious decision to use Google, rather it was a decision that was made for you because it was the default search on your device. Earlier this month, a U.S. federal judge ruled that was a problem. The recent antitrust ruling against Google may be the most important case about the internet since the internet began. After a year in court, a U.S. judge concluded that Google has a monopoly over search and had illegally maintained its monopoly by making massive payments to other companies to be their default search engine. Google pays Apple over $20 billion dollars each year to be the default search engine in Apple’s Safari browser. This gives it dominance in advertising. Google then uses advertising revenue to pay to keep itself the default search engine. It says volumes that when we search online, Google becomes a verb.

The fact that Google has the dominant market position is something we have all known for a long time and something that hasn’t lost us any sleep; we’ve grown so accustomed to its omnipresence that we hardly question its dominion. So how big is Google? Google is worth around $2tn, roughly the gross national income of Canada. Last year, it generated $175 billion in revenue from searches. And Google today receives nine times more web queries each day than all its rivals combined.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that. Google exists within a capitalist paradigm and has a responsibility to its shareholders to be as successful as it can be, loosely within the confines of its former motto, ‘don’t be evil’. [NB: The fact that a company must remind itself to not be evil is slightly worrying, as though there were an expectation that a company of its size and makeup would have a natural tendency to ‘be evil’ whether deliberately or not.]

Perhaps it’s worth remembering that just as individuals are capable of both good and evil, so are institutions. The larger the company, the greater its inherent trend towards maybe-not-evil-but-certainly-self-serving behaviour. From legally avoiding taxes resulting in less money for schools, hospitals, basic infrastructure and supercharging the bank balances of the super wealthy, to paying out the competition to maintain a monopoly. And while the company might paint itself as a champion of internet access in the developing world, Google's ecosystem has acted as a form

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Google’s monopoly money

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