Will Obama Break Up Google?
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I'm not saying this is an issue now, but as corporations grow, they are constantly pressured to increase earnings. Over time, they morph into institutions that no longer resemble their origins. It's tough for us to imagine the Google we all know and love becoming a corrupt, blood sucking corporation, but what if they never discover a new Golden Goose? There will be extreme pressure to draw more profits from search in any way possible.
Of course there are tremendous issues with putting Google under government control. The government is quite possibly an even less trustworthy entity. But unless a major competitor emerges in the next decade, something big will happen on this front.
The government won't just 'take control' of a public company; it may attempt to break it up, perhaps, but the Internet is, as of now, about as much of a free market as exists anywhere. If Google has near 100% market share, perhaps it deserves it?
They are a big company with a huge market share, and that scares people. However, they don't generally do things that give them an unfair advantage over their competition.
Yahoo, Ask, etc are definitely competitive in the search market. Google is the clear front runner, but they are not without significant competition.
The idea that they have a monopoly on cloud computing is completely absurd. They don't even have online storage for normal users live yet. They provide users with a place to store and edit documents online, but they are far from the only company doing that. They don't come close to competing with S3.
The only reasonable allegation is the charge of having a monopoly on online advertising. I'm still not entirely sure why they were able to buy DoubleClick, and I would not be too surprised if the advertising portion of Google was forced to split at some point in the future. As far as a monopoly on search and cloud computing go though, I would definitely agree that those are not valid in the current market.
Which I normally wouldn't put past a politician, but I'm not seeing the upside for them, either. Is there a public outcry against Google? No.
This is probably an extortion attempt to get "donations" to make sure this legal action just never seems to quite manifest in concrete form.
But, if it absolutely had to be done, one interesting possibility would be to fork (in the Unix system call sense) pieces of Google, such that every Baby Google gets full rights to the same search engine. Tricky, though. Very tricky.
This quote really gives the impression that she doesn't know what she's talking about.