It is widely known that Google has become somewhat of a monopoly in the domain of online search engines, far outreaching Bing or Mozilla Firefox in both popularity and the user’s perceived utility. Not rarely do people argue that only by using Google they can trust the answers they find through a search query. This, however, couldn’t be further from the truth.
But first, let’s talk about how Google came this far. Google is an example of a quasi-monopolistic platform provider that has made clever use of a variety of tactics to sustain its proprietary control in a multi-sided platform market (Rochet et al., 2003). Most of all, however, Google has profited from engulfing other services: The acquisition of YouTube, the world’s biggest video platform, and Android, currently running on 80 percent of the world’s smartphones, are only two of the countless examples of successful complementary platform envelopment (Croft, 2019; Eisenmann et al., 2011). Google has started out enabling users to navigate to such other platforms, but due to its tight control over search results in the internet and controlling over 60 percent of the world’s advertising revenue, platforms like YouTube and Android stood no chance to fight off the absorption into what was practically the house they lived in, despite their already tremendous size (Croft, 2019).
Google’s success in enveloping other platforms crucially originates from the brand image it has constructed for itself. Being a platform that centrally navigates consumers to other websites and web-applications, Google has cleverly positioned itself in a place where users tend to forget that there are even alternatives (Croft, 2019). Over accessing the world wide web numerous times, and using Google specifically in order to get where we want to be in the internet, it has become difficult for us to separate the concept internet from the concept Google: They have become one entity in the minds of consumers, as we seem to have forgotten that a GPS is not the same as the infrastructure it guides us through. Being perceived as the gateway to the internet (or even the internet itself) rather than just a search engine has helped Google tremendously in reaching the monopoly status it now possesses (Hagiu, 2009).
Now, to get to the core of what this blog post is about, why is there an issue to how tightly Google controls the flow of information in the internet? Well, there is an obvious one: We naturally don’t like the idea of depending on one conglomerate with our needs and desires, as we like to have options and hence be able to exert pressure on the companies to serve us better. But this is not even close to the long-term threat that comes from depending on Google for our every online search. The real problem is that there is a significant moral bias associated with every search query we enter, and that the information we obtain from Google, for as long as we are not talking only about isolated facts, is anything but helpful in creating knowledge free of bias (TED Talks, 2013).
The way a search engine works is, simply put, through discrimination. Usually, a program called a spider pre-sorts through endless numbers of webpages by following a web of hyperlinks from one page to the next. This spider collects specific information from many of those pages and feeds it into a search index, from where those sites will be pulled that the search algorithm determines are going to provide most utility to the individual user. The specifics of this algorithm are different from one search engine to another, but often work according to the frequency, order and array of the search terms on the websites in the search index (Code.org, 2017). The algorithm learns about the user’s preferences over time, being able to simplify the selection of suitable search results through relevance filters. These filters effectively narrow down the selection of possible results to such a small amount that, over time, the search results presented to the user homogenize: Once the algorithm has learned enough about us, it can be seen marginalizing the full volume of potential knowledge down to personalized bite-sized bits that add almost no value to what should be our goal to extend our knowledge horizon (TED Talks, 2013).
Seeing as how Google progressively homogenizes the information we consume, practically allowing the user to enter a tunnel of similar content and mainstream their information search, one could say that the search algorithms employed by the most powerful platform in the world blind us to the complexity of reality (Evans, 2003; Choudary, 2019). The more we engage in efforts to become smarter and better informed, the more our decisions lead us to getting stuck in one internally homogenous knowledge domain that does not allow for great leaps into other paradigms or perspectives. Add this to the fact that Google’s search algorithm is probably the biggest monopoly apparent in the modern economy, and there should be a growing skepticism about how heavily we rely on it to develop ourselves and our society ongoingly. Perhaps it is time to intensify the current deliberations in the US congress about anti-monopolistic interventions in the search engine domain to allow for a diversification of the information that leads our lives, which, besides the concerns about predatory competition, is quite certainly the biggest threat emitting from Google’s power position in the long term.
Sources:
Rochet, J.C. and Tirole, J., 2003. Platform competition in two-sided markets. Journal of the european economic association, 1(4), pp.990-1029.
Eisenmann, T., Parker, G. and Van Alstyne, M., 2011. Platform envelopment. Strategic Management Journal, 32(12), pp.1270-1285.
Evans, D.S., 2003. The antitrust economics of multi-sided platform markets. Yale J. on Reg., 20, p.325.
Hagiu, A., 2009. Multi-sided platforms: From microfoundations to design and expansion strategies. Harvard Business School Strategy Unit Working Paper, (09-115).
Croft, S. (2019). How did Google get so big?. [online] Cbsnews.com. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-did-google-get-so-big-60-minutes/ [Accessed 3 Oct. 2019].
Choudary, S. (2019). The Dangers of Platform Monopolies. [online] INSEAD Knowledge. Available at: https://knowledge.insead.edu/blog/insead-blog/the-dangers-of-platform-monopolies-6031 [Accessed 3 Oct. 2019].
Code.org (2017). The Internet: How Search Works. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVV_93mBfSU [Accessed 3 Oct. 2019].
TED Talks (2013). What FACEBOOK And GOOGLE Are Hiding From The World – The Filter Bubble. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6vM4dhI9I8 [Accessed 3 Oct. 2019].
