Future of the Web: Google’s market dominance a case for regulation?

Ever growing power of Google attracts political concerns and criticism.

The blog post of today is my comment I dropped on TechCrunch

Everyone loves TechCrunch. It is a bit grown to an empire by itself. That’s the way of network dynamics: Hubs emerge and alter the graph like a black hole changes the grid of space and time around. But anyway, TechCrunch is still really one of the top five relevant hubs for discussion and insight concerning serious web issues. One post of today made some wave (see the comment count as an indicator) and I commented on this. Comments are not quite dead (but there is a shrinking trend … Comments Dead, Twitter Holds Smoking Gun).

TC: The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO

Find this interesting article at techcrunch. The headline says it all. Good argumentation. It is really a bit alarming, that the guest author is writing anonymous. For more Google watching just google “googlewatch” and find serious places like googlewatch.eweek.com.

My Comment

(Looking for the source? It is page 2, ca. comment no. 100 techcrunch)

Dear Anonymous,
Google is not as stupid and fierce as the Cosa Nostra, to evidently put harm to people, who say something against them.

But I completely understand your fear. It is the part of the problem!

Google has grown to a superpower with perfect dominance not only in the ecommerce field, but
it is one of the most admired and powerful companies in the world concerning INNOVATION power! And with a reason – I do admire Google too in this respect! Their strategy, vision and great R&D.

BUT ….
Google is acting like a state, making peace around its borders. So even the admiration can be seen as the part of the strategic game.
(1) We geeks got more free tools that we can eat.

(2) The masses got a reallly nice brand with a lot of fun and free stuff. Be sure googling stimulates the happiness zones in your brain, because 99.92% of the time there is some success experience looking at the results and clicking through.
(3) The business has “full control” over online marketing with adwords -
…… but with Google somehow in the role of the bookmaker and manager sending the companies big and small in the place to fight against one another.
* Auctioning scare top places is ingenious if you own all the places!
* Game theory can show us: Biding in this battle field is a nightmare.

Any Sound Regulation Strategies?

There are some reasons against transparency, as I have seen in the comments. Regulation could be quite easy anyway. Google could be forced to let the results rotate in a systematic or random way. So the top three listed organic items for the top part of searches are just different for 10 searches with exactly the same query e.g.

In effect this means much less revenue for Google of course, but from an economic point of view a good part of Google’s revenue of today is just not legitimate “sound profits”, it is created on the foundation of the ever growing market dominance, actually a Google Monopoly in most conutries of the world.

Actually I see regulation only as the ultima ratio, I like the “free” in “free market” – but If governments will not act soon, the “free market” of information will be lost.

——-
BTW two years ago I have written a much to long comment concerning the issue. I identified Google as the “Worldbank of Reachability” and the troubleof this position. A German blogger then quoted my comment in full length – and hey I am still living healthy.

Google is just busy with the declared Mission: Organizing the information of the world.
Read this in 21st century as: Organizing the world.

The post of 2007 is only in German, sorry: Media-Blog » Blog Archive » Google – eine Welt-Bank der Erreichbarkeit … http://blog.firstmedia.de/?p=799