Google Abusive Market Conduct

Background 

In the current decade, Google company has emerged as the most competitive online company in the world. Some of its larger competitors being Amazon and Facebook. Its competitive advantage has resulted from its superior search engine has been globally embraced for learning, shopping, and for accessing almost all online activities. This has seen the market share for some of the companies such as WebCrawler and Infoseek which were earlier dominance of this online market segment being reduced to almost zero. Other companies have recently emerged with comparable algorithms include Bing own by Microsoft although it has significantly failed. This has left Google company retaining a market share of 64 percent worldwide. This search engine platform has further ‘born’ other ventures such as online advertising and shopping, social networking, and book publishing space. Further, its search engine is widely accessible and compatible with PCs and smart mobile phones. In the process of expanding its operations, Google has continuously acquired various companies in different industries such as smart home devices, robotics and intangibles like voice recognition services.

Issues 

Considering the extensive capital and other resources required to have a stable search engine, Google is currently enjoying the dominant position. As a result, this company has been using its displays to extent abusive market conduct. It is when the users are making queries in this search engine ( www.google.com ) that adverts inform of AdWords pop up intentionally for the user click open them. More often, they just appear on the search result page without any limitation to the type of products, services or information being advertised. With this, the unethical dilemma for the conduct of Google Inc. comes in where it uses these search engine pages for a favorable position and display of the shopping services blocking other competitors offering this service in the online market. In getting solution for this ethical question, it is important to answer these two questions. First, has Google systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service as displayed at or near the top of the search results? Second, has Google demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results? 

Analysis 

Yes, Google company has fondly made their own placement prominently and systematically in their search engines. Further, this unethical conduct has extended to the demotion of compared shopping services from the rivals. In fact, it is clear from the observation that approximately 90 percent of Google's revenue comes from the displayed adverts that pop up while the users are making queries. There are a number of reasons why this conduct violates competition ethics. First, Google diverts and decreases internet traffics of the competing shopping services and increasing those ones of their own online shopping services. Second, Google's marketing conducting causes an anti-competitive effect on its search engine and online shopping services.

If ‘No’ that Google does not make their own placement prominently and systematically in their search engines by diverting internet traffics, the other competitors would be earning at least a comparing earnings from search engines adverts. Based on research conducted on the clicks per page of a search engine, 95 percent of the total clicks are done on the first page where most of the google adverts appear.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, although Google has other products such as YouTube, Email Account, Android among others, Search Engine is the major source of revenue. Further, the latter has provided it with a dominant position in the market which has been used for such unethical conduct. In most cases, a firm being a monopoly in a given segment of the market, it starts to practice ‘bottleneck’ activities. These are unethical market activities aimed as seeing other competitors leaving this market. It true that Google company is unethically using its search engines to practice bottleneck on comparable shopping services.