Amy Wargo
Chamberlain College of Nursing
Google’s Antitrust Investigation
Antitrust is defined as a policy of government to regulate or break up monopolies in order to promote free competition and attain the benefits that such competition can provide to the economy. Monopoly is when there is a single provided product with no close substitutions. As apposed, to a monopoly, a free competition market is the situation in which multiple companies offer identical or close to the same products, which will compete with price and quality, and in some case costumer service. Natural monopolies are markets in which “only one firm finds it profitable to produce” (Masca). They occur in economies where the scale exists over the entire range of the markets demand. It can be difficult to create antitrust legislation because governments have a hard time establishing and enforcing the legislations they created because of the political powers of monopolies.
Google was involved with an antitrust investigation in 2012-2013. Googles original business model was to let everyone get what they wanted and needed by the use of the internet. People want to find how to go around the internet and publishers wanted to reach more readers and users of the information and products. Conflicts didn’t surface until the search engine market became concentrated on Google. It became to be the only search engine people were using and wanted to use, and therefore became a monopoly in the market. Google always wanted it users to get the benefits from the search engine and not have to both seeing advertisements on the side bar, like other search engines were doing at that time. They were bothersome and made the site more confusing and less to the point. There was an antitrust investigation concerning Google for over twenty months, ending in the summer of 2013. The Federal
References: Hoppner, T. (2013). Google: Friend of Doe of Ad-Financed Content Providers?. Journal of Media Law, 5(1), 14-30. Mosca, M. (2008). On the origins of the concept of natural monopoly: Economics of scale competition. European Journal of History of Economic Thought, 15(2), 317-353: Percha, J. (2013, January 3). FTC Settles Antitrust Investigation of Google. Retrieved September 23, 2014, from http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ftc-settles-google-antitrust-investigation/story?id=18126143