by Patrick Darski

Created on: November 14, 2009

Google does not hold a monopoly over anything at the moment, this is true simply by definition of monopoly, which is:" exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices" according to www.dictionary.com. Google does not have any particular power in controlling anything. This is because many other companies also have a good foothold in many of the same areas as Google. Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL each have a large user-base when it comes to e-mail. Each also has their own search tools. Google, in no way, controls the search engine, or email worlds.

In addition to this, Google also has no control over prices. In fact, almost everything Google offers is free, barring things such as the G1 phone. Extending this idea, Google has no total control whatsoever. It is simply a search engine at heart, it scours the Internet archiving what pages are where, and what they are about. Then allowing users to browse this vast archive. Google has no power to change anything on the Internet drastically, and if they started to omit or edit results too heavily based on totally commercial interests, people would simply move on to a different search engine. The same goes for the other services that Google offers.

It is also necessary to understand that it is almost impossible to have a monopoly over anything on the Internet. The Internet is all about freedom, and the second that a company tries to take away a large chunk of freedom, or fails to deliver well with their services, hundreds of open source and various other alternatives start popping up. This happened fairly recently when the popularity of Linux skyrocketed as a reaction to Microsoft's monopoly over the Desktop O/S market. The difference between the two is that Google is mostly a web-based company, and so they cannot try to strong arm anyone, because more reliable alternatives will spring up quickly, and Google would become obsolete. So, not only does Google not have a monopoly, it would be nearly impossible for it to develop one.

However, it is also important to understand that Google is in fact a major player in the internet world. It has gained a huge amount of support and popularity, both from the average user, and from the "computational elite". Many people rely on their services because they are reliable, quick, and easy to use. Many other companies may take an example from Google, but Google is still far away from having a monopoly over anything as yet, especially in the official, and correct use of the word.

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