Advertising Empire and The Corporate Behemoth
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by Jim Hedger
Is Google Too Powerful?
I am glad I waited until I got back to my office to respond to the question. Since it was posed to me 5 days ago, Google has:
Purchased DoubleClick for $3.1B, struck a deal with Clear Channel asked webmasters and bloggers to report purchased links, and infected one of my computers with Google Desktop by bundling it with an image viewer downloaded to that computer. Perhaps I have to give them some grace on that last point. They have been piggy-backing installations of their products for far longer than the past five days.
Google has become entirely too powerful. It is everywhere. Now, please don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to leave the impression I am “against” Google, I am just answering the questions as literally phrased, “Is Google Too Powerful?”
I truly admire the ongoing accomplishments that Google represents. At the same time, I worry about too much power in the hands of one particular interest group, especially when the main interest of that group is financial.
Google is amazing. Their mission to make the world’s information available is running ahead full steam and there is hardly a public area online Google hasn’t managed to somehow index. What started nine years ago as a brilliant university project has become the most important and influential public library on the planet. Google is the electronic library of the Earth. That’s pretty cool.
As Google has grown, it has faced enormous technical and ethical issues. For the most part, Google has tended towards altruism in the way it appears to handle the world’s information. Even in the exceptional circumstances surrounding its ongoing compromises regarding Chinese repression of information, Google appears to be striving to make the best of a very bad situation.
Google, like America, is and wants to be a force for good in the world. As we know all too well, sometimes application that force can be more than a little misguided.
On more than one occasion in the past three years, Google has used its enormity and self-replenishing fortune to seize important business deals and assets from its rivals. The most recent example is the $3.1B purchase of DoubleClick. We can also cite the MySpace ad-serving deal, the recent Clear Channel deal and the winning of the AOL search advertising business early last year. In each case, Google moved to limit or close competition in advertising spaces they want to enter.
If the DoubleClick acquisition is allowed by the FTC, Google will control nearly 60% of the annual online ad-spend. They are quickly approaching monopoly status. As any student of American business history should recall, monopolies are big trouble for the greater marketplace. That’s why there are rules regulating the establishment of monopolies.
Google is the world’s information source. It is the first place most people look when seeking information. As many of us know, that information can be manipulated fairly easily. That is not necessarily Google’s fault but, if they are the information source turned to by most people first, one must question the veracity of social and political information we the people use to make our purchasing and political decisions.
An ancient truism suggests they who control the past can control the future. The past is perception, the present is when we make decisions but it is always a fleeting moment. The future is where the decisions made in the moment play out. This truism is all about information. They that control information control pretty much everything we do. The problem we are facing regarding Google is one of information monoculture. That again is not necessarily Google’s fault but it is a reality.
One thing Google does have control over is how open and transparent it is as a company. Aside from the efforts of Matt Cutts’ team and Vanessa Fox’s team, Google is a very difficult company to get solid information from. Even when they do issue information, it is often spinned to the point it is non-sense. Take the recent 0.02% claim on click fraud caught by Google reviewers, (please). Though most of us can vaguely understand what Google was trying to say, we all know they said it the silliest sort of self serving way. For the smartest company on Earth, one would think they could do better.
In less than a decade the company has established the largest and most efficient advertising empire in the world. It uses its size to limit competition and to influence how the Internet culture is built and unfolds. As it grows, Google is becoming a corporate behemoth. As a public company, it has to be more responsible to its shareholders than it is to the rest of us, the public stakeholders.
Jim Hedger is the executive editor of SiteProNews.com. He is a long-time SEO, working as an analyst for Metamend Search Engine Optimization.
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