As I’ve been saying for a while now (perhaps even before I started researching this whole e-commerce phenomenon), Google is going to take over the world.
I know, it’s not such a unique or controversial thing to say as surely many Internet savvies have been saying it too. But now there are real facts to prove that people are thinking it. Or at least a seemingly legit research study.
Precursor LLC, a techcom research and consulting firm released the results of a study last week that researched the impact of Google Inc. on the Internet, economy, pricing and jobs. According to the study’s conductor and Precursor’s president, Scott Cleland, Google’s “free” Internet sector model does not create jobs and provides no net-economic growth, but rather “a deflationary price spiral, negative growth, property devaluation, and hundreds of thousands of job losses in over 20 industries.”
Rather harsh, I’d say.
He asserts that when Google re-brands its current YouTube-Double-Click video advertising business as Google TV this fall, it already will own an Internet video-streaming monopoly with 80 percent of the Internet audience, almost a billion viewers, 2 billion daily monetized views, and 45 billion ads served daily.
“While I expect the study to generate a healthy debate over whether Google’s behavior is pro or anti-competitive, pro or anti-consumer, and pro or anti-innovation, any rigorous analysis of the facts will lead to the same conclusion of this study – that Google’s exercise of its market power is spreading to many other industries and spreading at an alarming rate,” said Cleland.
How much of this is true and unbiased is not yet clear to me, but it certainly brings up an interesting debate and an even more interesting conclusion: that the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the European Commission’s Competition Directorate should sue Google for monopolization…so recommends Cleland.
You can read the whole study here, and then come to your own conclusion. I haven’t made mine yet, but am more than curious to hear yours.
Recent Comments