Google and EU
Google has a 90 percent share of internet searches around Europe, and under European law, it is prohibited from using this monopolistic position to give its other services an advantage. As a result, Google was fined $4.5 billion dollars. However, the article discusses how critics believe that Google’s response to the accusation isn’t adequate.
One of the main proposed changes that Google made as a response is to include other sites within the results with Google holding an automatic online auction to decide whose sites would feature there. However, Google’s own shopping service would also be able to participate in bidding. In class, we discussed how Google used Generalized Second Price auction (GSP), in which each advertiser announces a bid consisting of a single price it is willing to pay per click. Then after each advertisor submits a bid, the GSP procedure awards each slot i to the ith highest bidder. In this case, other price comparison sites would be bidding not only against each other, but also with Google itself for the sought-after search positions.
I found it very interesting how in the course of almost a decade since such controversies started, and only until recently that Google was fined. The problem here is that it is almost impossible for smaller businesses to outbid Google, while Google’s current algorithms are based on some mathematical unbiasedness as we discussed in class. I am wondering if in the future algorithms should also take into consideration the social and humanitarian factor; mathematical advantage tends to scale exponentially, creating a huge bifurcation with those who are behind.