Google: A Healthy Monopoly

Although, as the dominant Internet search engine, Google has revolutionized our culture and our way of using information, it also generates controversy each time it expands its business, and doubts have been raised about its respect for privacy, intellectual property and freedom of information.

This week Google attracted the notice of those who accuse it of being a monopoly, as the result of offering $12.5 billion for smartphone maker Motorola Wireless. The search engine company will have to defend its purchase before the regulators, but first it will have to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing entitled, “The Power of Google,” on Sept. 15, to examine the supposedly improper commercial practices that have already earned it hundreds of lawsuits — all around the world — for censorship, invasion of privacy and copyright violation.

Putting aside the projects that have been halted by judicial orders — like digitization of books because of the dispute with the authors’ guild, or the maps of military camps in war zones — I believe that Google can hardly be called a monopoly. In the case of Motorola, what appears to be a monopolistic expansion is really about buying patents and a strategy to compete with Apple, Microsoft and RIM by building its own Android smartphones. In fact, Google’s Android operating system is open source and can be used by any phone maker, such as the 39 that are doing so today.

Since its birth in 1996 with a mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google’s evolution has found success by competing against other companies, such as Internet Explorer and Firefox; it has purchased companies that in short order became leaders, such as YouTube; it has invented new services and products which aid in the expansion of knowledge, like Google Maps or the new Chrome Book personal computer that operates from a “cloud”; and it has experimented with new toys such as Google TV and its recent launch of Google+, the new social network that competes with Facebook.

Like any business that competes on quality, and with billions in annual revenue from its advertising services Adworks and Adsense, it is natural that Google would look to expand and often bumps against the thin line that divides healthy competition from monopolistic practices at the cost of dozens of legal disputes in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

As far as censorship goes, yielding to Chinese government requests to block dissidents and information on Tibet is abhorrent, but it is no less certain that Google has allowed dictatorships to be unmasked and has served to spread much information that was previously censored or unknown. At other times it has been a victim. One example is what happened last week in Argentina, where, by judicial order Internet providers were forced to block millions of blogs from its Blogger platform because the government judged that they could be used to spread data that could be harmful to national interests.

Its worst faults, however, are the side effects of its digital sophistication that bears on the right to privacy, since users’ personal data may fall into the hands of digital pirates or may be demanded by governments through laws such as the United States’ anti-terrorist Patriot Act.

Its roughest behavior has to do with copyrights. In Berlin, Germany, as well as New York and Bogota, Colombia, newspaper editors have united to keep their content from being available for free on the Internet. Google alleges that its systems are not obligatory and do not have to be used. In reality, the problem is that all businesses know that if they do not use Google’s services, they risk losing ground and competitiveness.

It seems to me that one can criticize certain of Google’s practices, but it would be unjust not to appreciate the vision of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who on a base of competition and constant innovation have revolutionized not only the Internet, but the entire information industry and have made the world smaller. Humanity is today better off with Google than without it.