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.
The Essay on Google: New-Product Innovation
1. The new product development process at Google is free flowing, fast-tracked, and without boundaries. Google encourages their employees to “think outside the box” and come up with new ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem. Once an idea is proposed, they sent it to testing right away. They try to put a product into use no more than 6 months after development has started; they are not into ...
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 Trade Commission decided that there was not enough evidence that Google used tactics that were unfair to be on the top of the industry and become the monopoly of the market.
Google was the only search engine people wanted to use and questions came about as to why people weren’t using other search engine sites. Google was investigated because they were becoming a monopoly in the market. Monopolies are not always a bad thing for our society. If something works why compete with it. Having one thing that works can be effective depending on the part of the economy and the market they are in. If all people use Google it will and had become universal and everyone knows how to navigate the search engine, then the site is doing its job. Just because it is better than the others and more people use it, it just means the site is doing a really good job at what it is supposed to be doing.
Having Google be the monopoly in some ways is actually a good thing because it helps users navigate through the internet in the most efficient way and helps publishers in the most efficient was to get their work public. Using other search engine sites confuses people after they get used to Google. Other search engines do not bring up as good of results and act as a not as good competitor when Google is on top of a huge market. And there is nothing to try to take over because Google is so huge and so dominant over the market.
References
Hoppner, T. (2013).
The Term Paper on Baidu Search Engine Consumer Behaviour
1. Summary The Internet is a tremendous repository of information. Numerous new hosts connect to the Internet every day, further boosting the already staggering amount of information resources uploaded to the Internet, thus enabling information on the Internet to accumulate exponentially. However, online information is scattered among countless hosts, and, with millions of websites, obtaining the ...
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
