Do you remember the standard oil anti-trust break? Maybe you did. Anti-trust rules are meant to help smaller businesses have a fair ground to compete instead of a company controlling the market. It is very rear to see a single company in a particular industry but some companies become relatively monopolist because they have become too big that other companies can’t compete with them on a fair ground.
What happens when a company is large and becomes a monopoly?
When companies are so big that they pose to become a monopolist, they have a few advantage over other the smaller ones and these advantages includes; They own the Market, they become too big to compete with, Using unfair advantages to their profit, they control the market and the price other small businesses will be selling, they in most cases influence the regulations in the industry.
Is Google a monopoly?
I have been using mobile devices and Google seems to be the largest in the operating system for most of them. The iPhone’s IOS is not something that can be gotten used on any operating system as it is closed but the android OS is the choice of most android phone makers.
Having the Google Android OS installed on mobile phones isn’t a big issue as they might be the producer’s choice but then what happens with the company putting Google’s app as pre-installed app into the mobile devices thereby not allowing users to explore other competitive brands. A lot of people do not bother checking other company’s products and apps since the Google pre-installed apps are already on the phone. With this, Google is trying to use its monopoly to influence the market and customer’s choices.
Also, Google uses its algorithm to influence searches as it puts options related to Google when people search thereby influencing consumer’s choices and affecting consumer’s decisions. If Google were not this Big, they won’t be doing this. I know a lot of people and their default search engine is Google. So if Google holds ¾ of the search engine market, this means it is influencing the decisions of ¾ users who uses the search engine.
I will not be the judge here, I will be leaving you to do justice yourself. So, do you think Google should be broken by anti-trust law?