Perhaps the most critical approach to Google’s position has been the European Parliament’s quest to limit its market control. The company, which controls over 90% of searches in many European countries, has faced a number of legal challenges from the European Parliament in recent years.
The European Union is known for its criticism of antitrust probes – it challenged Microsoft’s position as a market leader a few years ago. It has since turned its attention towards Google and criticised the search giant for abusing its market position.
EU has accused the company for its anticompetitive practises, claiming the company promotes its own services over those of its rivals. The European Parliament has called the company to unbundle its
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While there are many who have welcomed the EU’s decision to go after Google’s monopoly position, the US government has sometimes accused the EU for looking after its own interests. Nonetheless, the US Federal Trade Commission did look at antitrust complaints against Google earlier, but decided not to pursue stronger action.
The dangers of a digital monopoly
But should digital monopolies be limited? Are there any dangers associated to companies such as Google having such a big market share? The following are some of the dangers of a digital monopoly and the reasons why regulators are right to keep an eye on market position.
Problems over the ownership of data
Many experts, who argue against digital monopolies, aren’t necessarily concerned about the market positions per se or their influence on the competition, but the ownership issues over data. Companies such as Google are able to collect a vast amount of data from their users through the different operations and use this data in order to stay ahead of other businesses.
Furthermore, many argue the company hasn’t always acquired this data through appropriate measures. For example, Google has been accused of using exclusive deals in order to attract new customers and that some of its services collect data without its customers’
From the liberal point of view, the FTC and the EC should recognize the Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger as an international issue, not a national issue, so that it should restrain autonomy of state, in this case the U.S., preventing from intervention to protect domestic interests. However, in the case of Boeing-Mc Donnell Douglas, both antitrust authorities, specifically the European Commission, acted in a protectionist manner keeping domestic interests. In a study on 290 proposed acquisitions screened by the EC during 1990, it was found that although European merger and acquisition regulators claim to be protecting competition and consumers, in fact, the more harm suffered by European rival firms when the acquire is coming from the outside the EU, the greater the likelihood of European regulatory intervention against the proposed merger or acquisition . The EC’s focus on competitors rather than consumers was revealed by this study.
There are those who see a darker side to its dominance and believe that perhaps without a true competitor it has the potential for content and control abuse and there are others who are worried about the amount of personal information Google takes and stores from everyone who uses their services.
United States vs. Microsoft is one the largest, most controversial antitrust lawsuits in American history. Many claim the government is wrongly punishing Microsoft for being innovative and successful, arguing that Windows dominates the market because of the product’s popularity, not because of malpractice by the parent company. Others argue in favor of the government, claiming that Microsoft’s practices conflict with the free market ideal. There are many arguments for both sides of the lawsuit, but what the case really comes down to is this: does the government have the right to interfere in today’s marketplace? Or is Microsoft violating laws that are rightfully imposed by the government?
Today, Google, Inc. is worth more than General Motors, McDonald's and Disney combined, and the company continues to model the way in the global technology industry in which it competes. In fact, the company's name has become a verb and it is common practice for consumers to "Google" what they want to find online. To determine how Google, Inc. reached this dazzling level of performance in a relatively short period of time, this paper provides an analysis of the three external environments in which Google competes, the general environment, the industry environment and the competitor environment. Next, a discussion of two specific strategic issues as well as opportunities and threats that are facing Google, Inc. is followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the conclusion.
After a five-year investigation costing millions of dollars, the Antitrust Division found little that could be characterized as anti-competitive. But that did not stop the government. Not only did DOJ file an antitrust suit that caused Microsoft to cancel its planned
An example of a smaller less capable competitor is the Internet Archive which is only concerned with the copy right of “orphan” books. The public is the largest group that will be affected. People will benefit tremendously from this digital catalog but could suffer in terms of privacy, cost and innovation if Google is the sole information access provider.
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
Thereafter, they filed suite for such contraventions. The French government also became furious when Google decided to digitize books and documents so they counteracted to provide their citizens with its own search engine and page rank model named Quaero. However, that project later ruled against by the European Union as improper due to allocation of unfair funds, which is highly forbidden by European law. In regards to the launch of google.de domain and its free e-mail, Gmail went unforeseen under the radar and further encountered issues with the courtrooms. Google again infringed on a German businessperson’s trademark registration Gmail, which Google later demanded by German officials to cease all handouts of gmail.com throughout all of Germany. Thereafter, upon approval of the European Union the German government and companies came together to fund the Theseus another search engine for use that interconnected between Germany and France users.
Let us examine the matter form an even more logical point of view. According to the Gleaner dated Wednesday September 10, 2008 in the business section, The European Union represents a market of 490 million people, but critics of the agreement say that regional businesses are too small to adequately exploit such large markets, and that those companies that are able to compete will likely be overtaken targets by larger European Cooperation.
Google is arguably the most popular search engine used on the internet. The company offers superior search results and clearly employs workers with innovative ideas that can keep the company ahead of the competition. However Google’s own mission statement requires that it “Do no evil,” meaning that it has made readily available the tools that have made the company successful. The Justice Department would like to categorize Google as a monopoly, but due to its open book reporting and its development of additional services, proving monopolistic status would be difficult and perhaps ineffective.
I feel that companies have a moral and ethical responsibility to ensure to protect our data from being compromised, but also to inform us who they're sharing this information with and how it will be used, in addition to making sure that it's not used for any other purpose.
Since Google is a multination, it has numerous amounts of rule and regulations to abide by depending on the country’s laws and
GE has officially announced the merge and acquisition with Honeywell on October 22, 2000 and if it has been gone through, GE will be the biggest company in aerospace industry with more than 60% of total market share. Undoubtedly, GE will be more monopolists and may bring about the unfair competition with the rivals. Hence, both the United States (represented by the Department of Justice (DOJ)) and European countries (represented by the European Commission (EC)) have a "Antitrust Law ' subject to protect the merger
There is a intense rivalry among the big players of this industry. There have been some legal processes involving cases such as false advertising claims and patent infringement.
The General Electric (GE) and Honeywell International (HI) case illustrates the complexities of structuring mergers and acquisitions when the combined firms are capable of exerting market influence that threatens the competitive landscape. While General Electric's CEO, Jack Welch, characterized the deal as, "This is the cleanest deal you'll ever see," European anti-trust regulators were not so inclined to view the transaction as harmless to competition (Elliot, 2001).