Google a human being, it would still be too young to vote.
Google a human being, it would still be too young to vote. Yet the US technology group, which was founded in 1998, has spent much of its short life entangled in politics, and nowhere more than in Europe.
Before the company was 10 years old, the French and German governments had expensively tried to launch a European rival, “Quaero” (a predictable flop). A four-year-old antitrust inquiry is still rumbling on and the European Parliament in 2014 seemed to call for Google to be broken up. This is a company that can appear to have enemies as much as competitors, courting controversy on subjects that range from copyright theft and privacy law to tax avoidance.
To be better organised in these fights, Google has shaken up its European organisation, unifying it into one structure led by a single boss. Even without needing to battle regulators, the move makes commercial sense. The reason behind its previous shape - to arouse competition between company divisions - jarred with the holistic nature of what Google offers. The company’s brilliance is a reflection of how it cross-fertilises disparate data into new applications. Geographical boundaries do not go with the grain of this approach.
Google’s particular problems with Europe are the fruits of its success: its market share in search is 90 per cent, compared with two-thirds in the US. Its secret algorithm matters to anyone reliant on internet traffic, which will include many firms that are also competitors. It has a particularly tortured relationship with other media firms, who feel caught between the suspicion that their content is being purloined and the need not to vanish from public view on an internet search. One of its media rivals recently complained in an open letter: “Google doesn’t need us. But we need Google.”
Yet this entanglement in politics is about more than business; despite its seeming purity, Google’s mission “to organise all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” could not be more political. This is, after all, the information age; any company with such dominance of the world of data enjoys power across society as a whole - whether it wants to or not. Some of Google’s problems arise from the concerns of ordinary people, as when EU citizens won a “right to be forgotten” online. This reflected a particularly European concern for privacy: since the ruling last year, it has received hundreds of thousands of requests for links to be removed.
Google has every right to fight its corner, and to point at the competition it faces across many different markets. Its duds outnumber its successes, often because a rival company beats it to the punch. EU policy makers may fret about a lack of locally born rivals, but the answer is to clear away barriers to innovation rather than hobble a global champion. Even if some find its disruptive influence nerve-jangling, Europe would be weaker without Google.
Internet search is close to being a natural monopoly, and its raw commodity - information - is unlike any other. Google at times trod clumsily through this new terrain, reflecting the inevitable naivety of such a young firm. To those comfortable with the pace of innovation, Europe’s qualms may appear fearful and old-fashioned but Google will do better by assuaging rather than trampling over them.
Managing this has been impeded by its quixotic organisation. Fortunately, young firms are good at recognising and responding to their mistakes. With a structure more befitting an adult company, Google should now display more of the sensitivity it needs to prosper in an older continent.
