Google has become arguably the single most influential company in the world, and this has made a lot of regulatory authorities take a closer look at the company because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up shifting the entire market in its favor. Anti trust regulators in France have ended up winning a legal case against Google which suggested that the company favored its own ad exchanges by manipulating market conditions and making it so that competing market exchanges would end up getting a far more hostile environment in which they would have been forced to compete.
Google has essentially admitted to doing this, and this has resulted in the tech giant being forced to pay a 220 million Euro fine as well as signing a declaration that they will change how they do business to prevent anything like this happening in the future. This might spark a pretty massive change in the industry, one that would arguably make it so that large tech companies would no longer be able to create unassailable monopolies and prevent smaller companies from being able to compete and grow.
Some tend to criticize this type of action by saying that it restricts Google’s ability to innovate. Others still say that concrete legislation needs to be drafted since fining Google after the fact is essentially a tax that Google can pay rather easily and if this is the extent of the action that is taken then the end result might be that Google would not really have to worry about changing its ways since it will always be able to afford the fines. Still, this is a positive step in the right direction, and at a certain point it might just make more financial sense for Google to stop trying to manipulate the market.
Photo: Charles Platiau / reuters
H/T: Reuters.
Read next: Apple's take on Google Lens paves the way towards the legendary Apple Glasses
Google has essentially admitted to doing this, and this has resulted in the tech giant being forced to pay a 220 million Euro fine as well as signing a declaration that they will change how they do business to prevent anything like this happening in the future. This might spark a pretty massive change in the industry, one that would arguably make it so that large tech companies would no longer be able to create unassailable monopolies and prevent smaller companies from being able to compete and grow.
Some tend to criticize this type of action by saying that it restricts Google’s ability to innovate. Others still say that concrete legislation needs to be drafted since fining Google after the fact is essentially a tax that Google can pay rather easily and if this is the extent of the action that is taken then the end result might be that Google would not really have to worry about changing its ways since it will always be able to afford the fines. Still, this is a positive step in the right direction, and at a certain point it might just make more financial sense for Google to stop trying to manipulate the market.
Photo: Charles Platiau / reuters
H/T: Reuters.
Read next: Apple's take on Google Lens paves the way towards the legendary Apple Glasses
