[Note: Please find “Google’s WorldWideWatch over the WorldWideWeb” White Paper -- here.]
The European Commission’s 28-month-old Google search Statement of Objections is out of date and myopic.
What’s changed since the May 2012 EC-Google search settlement baseline?
Google has extended its May 2012 billion-user search dominance, into three newly billion-user dominant platforms (mobile, video, and maps), resulting in new competition complaints of abuse of dominance and new potential EC investigations – with Google’s abuse of its data dominance a common thread.
Snowden’s NSA-revelations have changed everyone’s awareness of Internet surveillance and the vulnerability of personal data, contributing to the passage of much stronger data-protection legislation by the European Parliament and to a European High Court ruling on Europeans’ right to be forgotten.
Multiple EU member countries have fined Google maximally for forcing integration of privacy/data-protection policies without meaningful user consent or opt-out so Google could aggregate user data profiles across platforms and enable Google+ to integrate and enable more sharing of more social data.
Google has made 56 acquisitions since May 2012, including five that have major implications for data protection: Waze, DeepMind Technologies, Nest, SkyBox Imaging and Dropcam.
What’s needed going forward?
With the new EC looking into Google practices from several directions, there is a need for a more up-to-date and holistic review of where Google’s dominance stands beyond search.
This new “Google’s WorldWideWatch over the WorldWideWeb” white paper provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date, big picture set of statistics, and quotes about Google’s global data dominance.
The white paper provides detailed evidence why Google’s data dominance is vast, purposeful, lasting, and harmful.
In a nutshell, it charts Google’s unique Internet Empire and data hegemony:
- Over half of all daily Internet traffic involves Google in some way, and Google Analytics tracks 98% of the top ~15 million websites;
- Google now controls 5 of the top 6, billion-user, universal web platforms: search, video, mobile, maps, and browser; and
- Google leads in 13 of 14 top commercial web functions of the Internet data economy and is #2 in the 14th: #1 in data collection, search, tracking-analytics, digital advertising, mobile, video, location, browser, Internet infrastructure, consumer-Internet of Things, apps store, translation, & email; Google is #2 & #3 in social with YouTube and Google+.
Please don’t miss the three summary charts that show:
- Google’s global leadership/dominance of the world’s data economy with 47 statistics in 13 categories;
- How Google increasingly dominates the global data economy; and
- How Google’s WorldWideWatch surveils more “universally” than the NSA.
To learn the harms of Google’s data dominance and recommendations to address them, please see the white paper, “Google’s WorldWideWatch over the WorldWideWeb,” here and the Executive Summary only -- here.
In sum, Google has rapidly transformed from a dominant search company into a global Internet Empire with near 360 degree ambitions, products and services that in turn naturally abuses its search and data dominance to extend its dominance further into adjacent markets.
To the extent that the new European Commission looks at Google and Europe holistically and based on more current facts and assessments, the EC will likely evaluate and address Google’s unique multiple dimensions of EC law enforcement problems in a very different and more holistic manner than its predecessor EC.
Simply, Google’s dominance, abuses of dominance and the harms from their unaddressed abuses of dominance, have proliferated rapidly and broadly, and also grown much worse, in the 28 months since the EC’s Google investigative process was effectively frozen in the time to try and narrowly settle the EC’s May 2012 Google search Statement of Objections.
Forewarned is forearmed.
[Please find “Google’s WorldWideWatch over the WorldWideWeb” White Paper -- here, and the Executive Summary -- here.]
