It has become the job of the state to protect people from tech giants consolidating dominance, but the question is how, says economist Renaud Foucart from Lancaster University.
A United States judge has found that Google is a monopoly on search and has used this dominance to reinforce its market position. This ruling, which is subject to appeal, brings the US regulator close to the European Commission in its approach to tech giants such as Google , Meta and Amazon. Regulators now agree that the nature of these companies’ business means that the market ends up becoming a monopoly dominated by one massive company.
To provide users with answers ranging from the best recipe for an apple pie to a recommendation for a new vacuum cleaner, Google first gathers information about every page available on the internet. Then, it uses its database of websites, the keywords used for search, what other people typically liked as an answer to similar queries, but also everything it knows about you, to rank possible answers.
But they also provide even more information to help tailor search ads. This includes how much time a user spends on a page, what they click on, whether they react positively or negatively to a result, where they are physically and how they travelled there.All this information about you is stored and serves a single purpose. It builds a highly detailed profile of you as a consumer that has enormous value to advertisers looking to personalise ads directly for you.
Google search is simply so big and so good at making money from advertisers that it is very costly to move away from it. In many ways, the market for advertising on search engines is actually very close to legal monopolies such as water distribution or rail tracks, where the cost of setting up the infrastructure are so big that there is simply no space for more than one company.
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