Riding the tide of in-built advantage
When we buy a new smartphone, It usually comes loaded with Google apps, including Chrome, YouTube, and Gmail among others. Turns out Alphabet-the company that owns Google-pays phone makers millions of dollars to make Google the default search engine in their gadgets. Google’s competitors are upset about this arrangement. It is no wonder, as most of us do not care to go to the settings and swap Google out for Bing or DuckDuckGo.
The issue sparked concerns of unfair trade practices in the U.S. and the Justice Department there filed a case in December 2020. The case was filed by the Attorney Generals of eleven States, as they felt Google was acting like a monopoly. Currently, the case has turned into the largest antitrust trial that the U.S. has witnessed in the Past 25 years. District Judge Amit Mehta’s decisions can impact the way all of us use the most popular search engine in the world-even in India.
Is the search engine business a monopoly?
The US. court is investigating if Google is running an illegal monopoly in the search engine business. Google’s search engine has earned a huge market share ever since it started presenting people with helpful information culled from billions of websites that have been indexed since former Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the technology during the late 1990s.
Today, Alphabet’s market value is around a whopping $1.37 trillion. However, there are several other companies in the fray of the search engine business, though most of them may be unheard of and unknown to large sections of internet users. According to statistics, of all internet users, a massive 91.85 percent use Google. Next comes Bing, from Windows, with just 3.01 of percent people using it. The remaining 5 percent of users use one of the many other companies, such as Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo.
If the U.S. court rules against Google, it could open the market up for new online avenues for consumers and businesses to explore in pursuit of information, entertainment and commerce. This may end up improving the quality of online services for consumers.
Picture Credit : Google