Digital Monopoly

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Trustbusting in the internet age

Should digital monopolies be broken

up?

European moves against Google are about protecting companies, not

consumers

Nov 29th 2014 | From the print edition

ALTHOUGH no company is mentioned by

name, it is very clear which American

internet giant the European Parliament has

in mind in a resolution that has been doing

the rounds in the run-up to a vote on

November 27th. One draft calls for

“unbundling search engines from other

commercial services” to ensure a level

playing field for European companies and consumers. This is the latest and most

dramatic outbreak of Googlephobia in Europe.

Europe’s former competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, brokered a series of

settlements this year requiring Google to give more prominence to rivals’ shopping and

map services alongside its own in search results. But MEPs want his successor,

Margrethe Vestager, to take a firmer line. Hence the calls to dismember the company.

The parliament does not actually have the power to carry out this threat. But it touches

on a question that has been raised by politicians from Washington to Seoul and brings

together all sorts of issues from privacy to industrial policy (see article

(http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21635077-online-businesses-can-grow-verylarge-very-fastit-what-makes-them-exciting-does-it-also-make) ). How worrying is the

dominance of the internet by Google and a handful of other firms?

Who’s afraid of the big bad search engine?

Google (whose executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, is a member of the board of The

Economist’s parent company) has 68% of the market of web searches in America and

more than 90% in many European countries. Like Facebook, Amazon and other tech

http://www.economist.com/node/21635000/print

05/12/2014

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