Google finances its free services by tracking users and targeting them with advertisements. Second, many of us have problems with Google’s business model, which the Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff has called “ surveillance capitalism”. Users were supposed to benefit from competition between rival implementations of open web standards, but today Chromium and therefore Chrome is the standard.Īs Firefox-developer Mozilla has pointed out, “from a social, civic and individual empowerment perspective, ceding control of fundamental online infrastructure to a single company is terrible”.
But there are other problems.įirst, Google now controls web development to the point where not even Microsoft can compete, as shown by the latter’s recent decision to replace its EdgeHTML browser engine with the open source Chromium on which Google’s Chrome browser is based. We can probably agree Google has won by delivering high-quality products, and more than 40 corpses in the Google Graveyard – soon to be joined by its awful social network, Google+ – prove it doesn’t always win. Google is far advanced in driverless cars ( Waymo) and artificial intelligence ( DeepMind). It is also challenging in other areas with its own cloud platform, an online office suite, Chromebooks, Waze, Nest and so on. It now dominates smartphone operating systems (Android), browsers (Chrome), web-based email (Gmail), online video (YouTube) and maps. Google started by taking over the search engine market.
Most recently, Google was fined €4.34bn for “very serious illegal behaviour” in using Android “to cement its dominance as a search engine”, according to the EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, a charge the company contests.
The EU has fined Google €2.4bn (£2.2bn) for abusing its search monopoly by favouring its products.
Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil”, but in the eyes of some it has now taken on the mantle of the “evil empire” from Microsoft, which Bill Gates and crew inherited from the IBM mocked in the Mac’s launch advert in 1984. How can I stop the intrusion of Google into almost everything? (After I’ve changed my email address.) Geoffrey
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