GOOGLE: Whatever happened to ‘Don’t be evil’?
The motto ‘Don’t be evil’ was removed in 2018 from Google’s corporate code of conduct. In the words of Ross LaJeunesse, a former head of international relations at Google, this reflected the transformation of Google into a company consumed by the need to ‘chase bigger profits and an even higher stock price’.
Google has morphed into a quasi-monopoly that now controls over 90 per cent of the US, European and UK search-engine market. Gmail, meanwhile, has 1.5 billion monthly users, or about 75 per cent of the market for web-based email. Like many of its oligarchic counterparts, Google now controls a huge revenue base. As writer and academic Michael Lind puts it, Google now functions as a ‘toll booth’ company, acting like a digital feudal lord that charges fees to cyber-travellers. Shielded from competition, it benefits increasingly not from innovation but from finding new ways to leverage its dominant market position.
Google’s search engine, once noted for its impartiality and open sourcing, has become increasingly politicised. It is using its market power to stifle competitors – as shown by investigations in Europe, the UK and in the US. Indeed, the EU fined Google billions of dollars in 2021 for giving preferential treatment on its search engine to its own shopping service. One of Google’s few competitors, the much smaller DuckDuckGo, accused it earlier this year of manipulating browser extensions to drive customers from rival products. And this month, the UK state regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, initiated its own probe into both Apple and Google.