The Struggle to Regulate Google

By Georgia Edwards '21This past Wednesday, the European Union fined Google $1.7 billion for violating antitrust laws. In fact, this was the 3rd fine that Google has received from the EU over the past two years, totaling $9.3 billion. The EU claimed Google was preventing certain companies from reaching competitive success by blocking their advertisements. Google is dominating advertising through exclusivity contracts between their company and third party vendors. Essentially, these contracts allow Google to regulate what type of ads these third parties show while using the Google search engine. Subsequently, Google has been preventing ads from competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo from showing up on these third party vendor sites, essentially, making Google into a monopoly. The concern over regulating Google is not a new one. Since 2006, the European Union has been accusing Google of its seemingly unethical market domination strategies. The EU is by far leading the movement on Google regulation, with billions of dollars in fines so far. The push from the EU to fine Google has sparked a wave of activism in the US. Many believe that privacy regulations are inevitable in the US. Just this past summer, California passed the California Consumer Policy Act. This legislation gives consumers more rights and access to their private information that may be potentially used for online data collection. The CCPA is a perfect example of how the US is moving towards more regulation on big data platforms. Donald Trump has even made frequent statements about Google in the past, claiming that the platform purposely was advertising Hilary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election. Trump wrote in a tweet that Google was “suppressing voices” through its information regulation. If worldwide legislation is put into place that heavily regulates Google, I predict Google’s profits will certainly take a negative hit. However, Google is not currently showing any signs of slowing down. In the wake of Google announcing Stadia, a new gaming platform, the stock is up 2% from the day the EU fine was announced, and 17% in total since January. Additionally, their market value has gone up by $17 million. These stock increases really show how powerful and influential Google is becoming. If global legislators really want to prevent Google from violating so-called antitrust laws, they will need to do more than just fine Google. Google is clearly making enough money that they can just pay the fine and move on. However, to make long-lasting change, global legislation that promotes privacy and fair competition will need to be put in place.  Sources:https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47639228https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/google-eu-fine-investors-not-worried.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/business/google-fine-advertising.htmlhttps://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/10/trump-google-youtube-search-results-biased-against-republicans-conservatives-column/1248099002/https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-eu-fine-antitrust