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When we think of Google, we think of the innovative internet-giant known for their search engine and loved for all kinds of application making our lives easier. The reputation of google has always been the one of a friendly company, not considering that this company is trying to cut competitors out of the market since many many years with partly illegal methods.

But what am I talking about? So try to google “laptop” or “smartphone” or basically everything you want and you gonna realize that Google presents Google-Shopping results just over all other search results. With this approach Google bundles it’s search engine with their own shopping  comparison site and is, at least in the eyes of the EU-commission, stifling innovation and acting to the users detriment (EU-Commision, 2016). The mechanism, Google is using, is generally called “entry deterrence”. Entry deterrence refers to the act of leveraging a monopoly position in one market to gain a monopoly position in a second market through bundling products or services together (Whinston, 1990). In the case of Google this theory would implicate that Google has a monopoly position in the search-engine industry, which is from a statistical point of view true, and would like to transfer this monopoly to the market of price comparison (statista, 2014).

But why should that bother us and what impact does this bundling approach has on our lives? The EU-commission is highly concerned that consumers are not necessarily capable of seeing the most suitable search results in this price comparison, because Google isn’t applying their own penalty system for price comparison websites to their own price comparison Google-Shopping (EU-commission, 2015). Furthermore Google is lowering the innovation in this market, because competitive shopping comparisons are aware of the fact, that individuals will see Google’s shopping results before the ones of their own comparison website(EU-commission, 2015). A follow up question is now, what will be the consequences for Google, if the lawsuit against the EU-commission will end to their detriment?

First of all, the EU-commission wants Google to stop favoring its own product comparison service by not exposing it the their penalty system as well as listing it above the regular search results. Furthermore Google will be fined for using anti-competitive methods. Just god knows how high this fine will be, but it can be as high as 10% of Google’s revenue (Neslen, 2015). This would be approximately 6 billion euros (Neslen, 2015).

In my opinion I don’t know if Google is really affecting the competition or if it is detrimental for the general public or not. The actual point is, that Google uses the bundling in several sectors, not online in the search-shopping combination, to expand their market power and that everybody of us is forced to consume the bundle, whether we want to or not.

 

References:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2532_en.htm

http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/Courses/Spring2000/BA269D/Whinston90.pdf

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/74271/umfrage/beliebteste-preisvergleichs-portale-im-internet/

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4781_en.htm

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/15/google-faces-antitrust-action-from-eu-competition-watchdog

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No matter where you look today, information technologies are omnipresent in our daily lives. They help us communicating with our friends, paying via credit card in the supermarket or booking flights over the internet. All these techniques are, for sure, highly useful tools to make our everyday life more convenient, but this also leads to the fact that we are highly dependent and maybe can’t do basic tasks without them. So the question is what exactly would force our system of different technologies to collapse? One answer might be for sure a war, but a more hidden threat, which can and will strike us one day is a Coronal mass ejection.

Coronal mass ejections or CMEs are huge explosions of magnetic field and plasma from the Sun’s corona. When CMEs impact the Earth’s magnetosphere, they are responsible for geomagnetic storms and enhanced aurora. The energy of these CMEs have also the potential to damage the circuitry of satellites, power grids and all sorts of electronic devices, which we use in our daily lives.

For now let’s think of a world where this scenario takes place and for the sake of simplicity just satellites stop working. Such a dysfunction of satellites would affect, for instance, telephones, navigation systems and the global finance industry. To focus on Navigation Airplanes or ships wouldn’t be able navigate in a proper way anymore because their navigation is based on location information gathered from GPS technology which stops working when satellites fail. This in reverse would affect the way goods like food or raw materials are transported.

The point is, humans are, as mentioned before, highly dependent on all these technologies and these technologies are influencing the way we are using data and information. Our worldwide network of information systems became so crucial for our daily tasks, that such an unfavorable event would force us to dramatically rethink all commonplace activities in our personal lives and all processes of companies such as supply chains of food and the transport of other resources.

The pending questions now are: Is such an event likely? And what can we do to prevent our information infrastructure from such an natural phenomenon?

Firstly, the good thing about this phenomenon is that “the probability of a massive CME directly hitting Earth is pretty low[…]” as  Dr. Newmark, a Solar Physics Scientist in NASA’s Heliophysics Division, says, but nevertheless if such a big CME would hit the earth the impact would be dramatically high and therefore humanity has to come up with feasible approaches to secure our essential information systems network.

One possible solution facing this problem might be the exact forecasting of CMEs in the future and preventing power grids and satellites to be caught off guard by turning them off at the exact right time.

But as Nils Bohr (Nobel laureate) once said “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future”. So the threat of this natural phenomenon will stay inherent in our daily lives and in the meanwhile can’t do anything about it, if such an event takes place.

References:

http://www.ecology.com/2014/05/01/earths-greatest-threat-cmes/

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/flare-impacts.html#.V-OmAvmLSUl

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a11441/can-we-predict-solar-flares-and-protect-our-satellites-17341922/

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/26oct_solarshield

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/space-weapons/what-are-satellites-used-for#.V-OnPvmLSUl