Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Is Google becoming too monopolistic and anti-competetive? What regulations should be imposed on it?

Remember the anti-trust allegations regarding Microsoft from the early 2000s? Well, Google is the new Microsoft, but it is 100 times worse. The worst part is that not enough people are noticing or caring. If Apple or Microsoft were engaged in the same criminal activities as Google, they would have been hit left and right with lawsuits, but since it's Google, they can (unfortunately) get away with that stuff. Here are the ways Google is abusing their market share and becoming a monopoly.

-Whenever you search for a local business, its Google+ page ALWAYS pops up first. This provides a huge competitive disadvantage to Yelp, OpenTable, or TripAdvisor.

-Whenever you visit Google's homepage, you always get hit with "download Chrome" prompts, links to Google-owned YouTube, and advertisements for Android products. Users think they're visiting a search engine but instead get bombarded with promotions for Google products. Gives a huge disadvantage to Microsoft Edge and the iPhone.

-Whenever you search for a geographic location, at the top of the page you get an interactive Google Maps diagram but competetors like Apple Maps or Bing Maps often aren't even included in the search results.

-If you do an "iPhone vs Android" search, Google always makes webpages favorable to Android at the top, which is not only anti-competitive but anti-consumer because they would be better suited with OBJECTIVE information.

There far more examples (too many for me to list) of Google's behavior.

Read more: https://iphoneus.org/faq/is-google-becoming-too-monopolistic-and-anti.html