The Google Question
I wrote a joke about Google taking over the world on my personal blog. But the more I think about Google, the more it raises some very real questions about technology, economics, and our corporate system.
No one should have missed the fact that the Google name and brand is exponentially growing. They have purchased Double Click and will probably be bidding on a chunk of the wireless spectrum in the near future. At the same time there are some serious allegations that Google has become a monopoly and the ball is starting to roll on anti-trust matters.
The last major company in a related field to be broken up under the anti-trust laws was AT&T. And as we speak the Baby Bells are not so slowly solidifying back into the exact same company it was. If our efforts to deal with monopolies in this case do very little in the long run against a solid target, what happens when you target one is not such a solid target.
By solid target I mean physical property. AT&T serves communication which is rather ephemeral, however, it is based on very solid infrastructure. You can divide and manage this sort of capital property. But what do you do when the monopoly is over digital information?
The data banks that serve and spider the web are real enough. Even the storage for the records is very real and can be pointed to. The problem would be disassembling what data goes to what Google service. The data has all become joined in an ever widening net of shared services and information.
There is a bigger problem though. Google has such a wealth of resources, talent, and information that it might have more effective power than any previous company. If an anti-trust suit succeeded against Google, the real question is: What if they said no?
I will follow up on one answer to that question in my next post.
