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Does dominance in one segment of the digital market help a company achieve preeminence in others? The question lies at the heart of recent initiatives in the European parliament to recommend Google be broken up
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Does dominance in one segment of the digital market help a company achieve preeminence in others? The question lies at the heart of recent initiatives in the European parliament to recommend Google be broken up.
Europe has no legal right to do so. Google is a US company, but the question is still important. Does Google need to unbundle its main search engine from its other specialized search engines for restaurant reviews, videos or news? It is accused of downplaying results from competing specialized search engines.
The issue is similar to the famous browser wars of the early Internet age. Microsoft was accused by the US of using its dominance in operating systems to crush the Netscape browser. There are complex economic principles involved, but such regulatory tangles involving new technologies with network effects only serve to highlight the challenges posed by the convergence of medium and message, platform and product.
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