Google is undoubtedly one of the biggest companies of our time. The company’s search engine has become so popular that we don’t look up things on the Internet anymore, we ‘google’ them.
The company’s conquest of the digital business world has led some to argue it’s not just an ordinary company anymore, but rather a monopoly. But what are monopolies and is Google a digital monopoly? If so, should regulators try to find a way to limit them?
This guide will look at whether we should be worried about Google’s dominance in the digital world and why it might not be one of the world’s most invincible companies.
What is a monopoly?
Before we look into the evidence of Google as a monopoly, it is important to understand what a monopoly is. The word is often used in the media, but not always in its proper meaning.
In its essence a monopoly is a situation in which only a single company or group has the ownership of nearly all or all of the market for the given product or service. Therefore, a monopoly is a situation where competition is absent.
In a strict academic sense the extreme case of capitalism is characterised as a market containing a single operator. Such situation often results in increased prices and even inferior products as the group has no competition in the market.
Because of this, monopolies are tightly controlled in the modern world and therefore the strict definition of monopoly is highly unlikely in the modern world. If a single company would control a
For one thing, Google, like the railroad in its time, is an important part of how people interact with each other today. People use Google to digitally meet with others, communicate, and even sell things. Multiple people are affected by Google each day. 87% of people have claimed to use the internet in 2016 (Anderson). To add onto this the number of people who don’t use the internet has been decreasing since 2000.
A monopoly is advantageous to the society and is encourages by the government if there are high fixed costs and very strong economies of scale. At the same time, it could also lead to unequal distribution of wealth; containment of consumer choice; lobbying and unethical spending.
Sergey Brin noted, “Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.” Nicholas Carr’s essay challenges this assertion. Nicholas Carr believes even though there are multiple search engines, “the faster we surf across the Web-the more links we click and pages we view-the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.” This topic elicits such strong responses because technology is a part of our everyday lives. Technology is only becoming more advanced and will continue to be a source of debate for all who use it.
There is just a one person who sells products or services and there are no incentives which help to break this monopoly. There are many monopoly industries in the market. In monopoly, they use patents because they don’t like if someone’s copy their inventions.
Monopolies are quite dangerous economically, and are usually broken up by the federal government, with only two exceptions- electricity, and gas. These are modern examples. A monopoly is the economic term for when a company that makes a product has no competition, and can raise the prices as high as they want. For example, the most obvious and powerful monopoly of the industrial revolution was the railroad monopoly. They made money quite quickly as a shipping company, and destroyed any and all competition as the only transcontinental railroad at the time. It’s leader, Cornelius Vanderbilt came to be considered one of the most powerful people of all time, due to his control over who he shipped for.
In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge high prices.[4] Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry (or market).[5]
By definition a Monopoly is exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices (Monopoly 2012). Individuals are often time fearful of a company or industry becoming a monopoly because it would control too much of a market share, and do whatever wants; this includes raising prices, to using excess capital to branch into even more areas (Rise of monopolies 1996). The market structure of a monopoly is characterized by; a single seller; a unique product; and impossible entry into the market (Tucker 2011). A monopoly can be a difficult thing to accomplish being that a single seller faces an entire industry demand curve due to the fact it makes up the industry as a
Google is the most popular search engine in the entire world. Google made the biggest impact on the internet. All the question to the answer is one click away, without doing tons of research and hard work. Despite it makes our lives easy, in the article “Is Google making us stupid” by Nicholas Carr, Carr pointed out many issues caused by using google.
A Monopoly refers to a market where-by there is one or limited suppliers of a given commodity to the market.
Google Company is one of the global leaders in technology and in enabling people access information from the internet through their efficient search engines. Google immediately gained the attention of the internet sector for being a better search engine than its competitors (Wheelen, Hunger, Hoffman, & Bamford, 2015). This was after a tremendous effort in marketing their services and capturing a large market worldwide. However, there being so many risks and challenges in this line of business Google has had the urge to come up with new strategies so that they are able to overcome any challenge before them. The major problem that Google has
As mentioned before, Google maintains that it does not meet the requirements of a monopoly. It is more likely that they could themselves to be involved in monopolistic competition. In a monopolistic competition, there are many firms that offer similar products or services that are similar but not identical. Google has conducted business in a smart way. When Google entered the internet market, companies such as Yahoo and MSN had been in widespread use. Google began in direct competition with the search engines of these companies. The company gained near immediate popularity due to its simple design and later its more helpful and accurate search results. Over time, Google added email, image searches, You Tube, and most recently its own web browser to compete with Internet Explorer called Chrome. Had Google not chosen to develop these other avenues, the share they hold in the internet search industry could easily be classified as a monopoly. This is because of the way Google offers search results. The methods used are innovative and while readily available to the competition, according to Google itself, are unique to
What is a monopoly? According to Webster's dictionary, a monopoly is "the exclusive control of a commodity or service in a given market.” Such power in the hands of a few is harmful to the public and individuals because it minimizes, if not eliminates normal competition in a given market and creates undesirable price controls. This, in turn, undermines individual enterprise and causes markets to crumble. In this paper, we will present several aspects of monopolies, including unfair competition, price control, and horizontal, vertical, and conglomerate mergers.
Google is a multinational corporation that serves thousands of consumers worldwide. Through Internet related products such as Internet searches, maps, emails, mobile apps, and other online contents for users Google became the company it is today. Every employee of Google is different in his or her own way; making it a well-diversified organization similar to the global audience they serve. Google’s mission statement is to organize information from all around the world and make it universally accessible at a quick and orderly fashion. This means creating a search engine smart
Google is a company that was conceptualized in a dorm room by two Stanford University college students in 1996 (Arnold, 2005, p. 1) and has morphed into one of the greatest technological powerhouses in operation today. What began as merely a means to analyze and categorize Web sites according to their relevance has developed into a vast library of widely utilized resources, including email servicing, calendaring, instant messaging and photo editing, just to reference a few. Recent statistics collected by SearchEngineWatch.com reflects that of the 10 billion searches performed within the United States during the month of February, 2008, an impressive 5.9 billion of them were executed by Google (Burns, 2008). Rated as Fortune Magazine’s
Google is the most successful information technology and web search company in the world. It was founded in 1998 by two Stanford Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company name, Google, is a play on the word “googol” which is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose this name to reflect the large amount of information on the web. The two created this search engine so that people can find anything on the web all in one place. The company’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Now, the company is far more than a search engine website, it has grown to be a substantial collection of products and services that are