Regulatory Pressure Closes in on Google’s Digital Advertising Dominance
The promise of the Internet was decentralization and democratization. In the absence of centralization, search engines such as Google’s Search emerged to “enable users to retrieve webpages and information stored on the Internet.” The Congress’s Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets notes the following: “Google was the first company to crawl the entirety of the Internet, a feat motivated in part due to its PageRank algorithm, which used links between pages to identify the most relevant webpages for specific topics and queries. Unlike most search engine algorithms at the time, the quality of PageRank results improved with more webpages, incentivizing Google to crawl a greater portion of the web.” As the Internet has grown, so has the cost of crawling the Internet. Ironically, the decentralizing aspects of the Internet and the lack of aggressive antitrust regulatory policy paved the way for firms such as Google to centralize certain aspects of the Internet.
According to CNBC, Search is Google’s most profitable unit generating over 70 percent of Google’s digital advertising revenue. Key to Google’s race to becoming one of the first trillion-dollar companies, Search relies on users continuously being pressed to defaulting to Google services whether through browsers defaulting to Google services or through users…
