Google’s Legal Troubles Keep Mounting
We’ve posted before about the massive antitrust trial that concluded in August with Judge Amit Mehta writing a 300-page opinion on the search giant’s illegal actions in building and maintaining a monopoly. The Department of Justice is demanding that Google be forced to sell off Chrome - a browser used by fully two-thirds of people worldwide. As far as remedies go, that’s a fairly extreme one, but the fact that Google have been using information gathered by Chrome to benefit their other services is something that the DoJ (quite rightly) says is unethical and anti-competitive.
Although Google had some success back in September when they won their appeal against a €1.5 billion fine from the EU, they still have €6.7 billion outstanding fines. Google are also currently under investigation by the EU for violating the Digital Markets Act, the potential penalty for which could be 10% of their global annual turnover (which in 2023 was $306 billion).
Not wanting to be left on the sidelines it seems, the UK and Canada are both getting in on the act, with a £7 billion class action being approved by the Competition Appeal Tribunal just last week and Canada's Competition Bureau taking the company to court for anti-competitive conduct in its online advertising.
Google, of course, swears blind that all of this is a misunderstanding and that their actions to create a massive, worldwide monopoly were actually in the customer’s best interests. Their tweet after the monopoly decision earned massive scorn from web professionals for essentially saying, “We’re a monopoly because we’re great.”
Anti-Social Media
It isn’t just search that’s having a bad time towards the end of 2024, social media is undergoing a two-fold seismic shift. First there are increasing calls from legislative bodies around the world for social media platforms to take a sterner line against bullying, misinformation, and propaganda from potentially hostile third parties.
There’s also the question of whether social media platforms are appropriate for children, something Australia have now decided to ban anyone under 16 from all social media, with the UK looking to follow suit. This blanket ban for all children is something that has sparked furious debate, both about how to enforce this and what constitutes a social media platform. It’s also seen social media platforms come up with novel defences, from LinkedIn’s, “We’re too boring for children to us,” to Elon Musk having Twitter simply decry the move as illegal (something that really doesn’t hold water with the Australian parliament.
The Next Generation
As well as new lawsuits and legislation, there are other challenges for big tech, namely precocious upstarts looking to muscle in on their territory. Various AI-based search engines have been released over the past year aiming to take some of the wind out of Google and Bing’s sails by showing up their own in-house AI search offerings.Then the microblogging world was shaken by the sudden massive growth of Bluesky. The longstanding frontrunner in this field has been Twitter almost since it launched in 2006 (most of us still refuse to call it X, except when making jokes at the new owner’s expense) and has been the target of many controversies since changing hands in 2022. With the heightened tensions online sure to the recent US presidential election, Twitter became embroiled in accusations of bias and manipulation after Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump became obvious (to the point that Musk now has an unelected governmental post and has been a firm fixture at Mar-a-Lago for the past month).While Meta tried to break into the microblogging business with Threads last year, it never made a huge impact and the platform itself seemed unsuited to the typical high-profile news and politics consumers of Twitter. This has meant that Threads never really saw any serious growth and lags far behind its ex-bird competitor.Enter the enfant terrible of microblogging, Bluesky. Created as an in-house project by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (who has left the board by May of this year), Bluesky was only opened to the general public (after an extended period of beta testing) in February 2024. Since then it has grown from three million users to six million in July, to over 20 million users on the 20th of November.All of this points to growing dissatisfaction with Twitter, especially amongst those who do not share Elon’s own political views. When the change to how blocking works on Twitter, Bluesky gained 1.2 million new users within 48 hours.
Fading Giants
Big tech companies disappearing into obscurity isn’t a new phenomenon. AOL, Excite, MySpace, Geocities, Vine. The graveyard of once mighty digital behemoths is rarely visited by anyone, except academics who might be interested in exactly what went wrong for these services. Could we see Google or Twitter join them in the cemetery of irrelevance?
While it’s possible that Google’s massive dominance might be suddenly cut down to size by legal intervention, actual user behaviour takes longer to move. The fact that under 30s are less likely to be on Facebook is something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, but is a solid and widely known fact today.
Whether it’s the beginning of the end of Google and Twitter remains to be seen, but the rumblings do show that you shouldn’t keep all of your marketing eggs in one basket (or even two), even if that basket looks invincible.
