Let’s Break Up Google and Get Back the Revenue We’ve Lost
In December 2020, Attorney Generals from 38 states filed suit against Google. They claimed that Google illegally maintains monopoly power over search engines and related advertising. Other legal actions filed against Google worldwide. To break up Google or “Big Tech” monopolies is a rare bi-partisan issue in Washington, D.C. today.
However, these legal maneuvers only scratch the surface of the potential harm that Google’s search monopoly poses. It harms small and home-based businesses, particularly those dependent on their online presence — which is now just about every business.
Google Underpins the Online Economy
Through its dominating search engine and website content indexing, Google underpins the entire online economy. Google threatens the survival of any small business through content de-indexing or by downgrading its presence. (Visit Google’s support webpages to read about the threat yourself.)
With its “Big Tech” kins, Facebook and Amazon, Google rigged the Internet to monopolize the majorities of digital marketing revenues. It is incomprehensible
that such an all-powerful monopoly as Google operates today, with almost no due process nor accountability.
Yes, It’s Time to Break up Google
First, let’s take a look at the online search monopoly and its impact on small business. With a share of well over 90 percent, Google monopolizes online search. As monopolies are typically illegal, this simple fact alone supports it’s time to break up Google or at least heavily regulate it like a utility.
Google uses this search dominance to potentially threaten businesses that they determine are not complying with their vague, arbitrary, and restrictive rules for content posting. This damages a website’s ability to compete with Google as a content provider.
Google is itself a content provider through the content it delivers in search results. Google has the hidden power to manipulate or downgrade the ranking of a business’s website content. This allows Google to maintain a dominant position in delivering its content choices to search engine users. It also allows Google to deliver content choices in a manner that maximizes its search advertising revenue.
Google Wields Enormous Power Over All Small Businesses
No matter how arbitrary and damaging Google’s content rules might be, a business has no alternative but to try and comply. Having website content downgraded or de-indexed by Google damages or puts a company out of business. And there is no significant competitor on delivering search engine content results to replace Google. This enormous power Google exerts over small businesses is another reason to end the Google monopoly.
Google also shifted online marketing towards content posting, known as “content marketing,” with websites now focused on getting content to rank higher in Google’s search engine results. This is all at the expense of conventional digital marketing.
Google Drives an Entire Content Marketing Industry
This transitioned the market towards increased Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and a multi-billion-dollar “content marketing” industry, focused on getting more web content ranked higher. There are now thousands of SEO companies, “Google Sharecroppers,” that created sophisticated business models to help well-heeled clients game Google’s complicated and secretive search engine algorithms, to get their website content more highly ranked.
Smaller, less capitalized businesses are at competitive disadvantages in funding expensive SEO to improve their Google search results and ranking. This harms their abilities to compete against better SEO’d websites.
Restrictive Rules Damage Ability to Compete
Google also creates restrictive rules on content posting that harms a website’s ability to compete in the content posting arena. An example is to not allow compensation for website links, even though Google’s business model is largely focused on promoting website content and links. This enables Google to then arbitrarily penalize other websites that post content by, for example, designating the website as receiving compensation for untagged links.
If Google downgrades a website’s content, it deceases that website’s ability to compete against other content websites. Combined with its secretive search engine algorithms, this allows Google to potentially manipulate competition in their favor.
Google Picks Winners and Losers
Google clearly states that it penalizes (or even de-list) the ranking of content within its search engine, including the links within the content, if they judge something of value was exchanged for links and content. This hurts a website’s ability to survive and compete in posting content. “Exchange of value” is an arbitrary and impossible standard to enforce. Moreover, it puts Google in control — as a search monopoly — to pick website winners and losers to penalize.
As a result of Google’s dysfunctional market regulation, the search engine tail now wags the Internet dog. Search engines are no longer just about finding things online but evolved into a dominant way that businesses must market themselves today. Google’s search dominance perverted the online landscape to focus heavily on content posting, which Google then monetizes through its search advertising monopoly.
Enabled by this monopoly over online search, Google dominates the digital marketing arena, with a 30+ percent share totaling $41 billion of the $135 billion U.S. digital advertising market (Forbes.com). Its “duopoly” partners Facebook and Amazon corner an additional 24 and 10 percent respectfully. Other large “industrial websites” scoop up most of the rest. This leaves nothing but digital marketing table scraps for the vast majority of small and home-based business websites. This rigged monopoly deprives small and home-based businesses of billions of dollars in online revenue each year.
Google Monopolizes Search Engine Advertising
Another type of digital marketing — search engine advertising — shows in particular the dominance of Google’s advertising monopolies. Search engine advertising is the placing of ads in search engine results. Google’s rigging of online search into the huge content marketing industry drove massive growth in search engine advertising. Google’s search engine dominance enables it to corner $32 billion — over 60 percent — of the $55 billion annual search advertising market.
Other large digital companies scoop up most of the remaining search advertising dollars. Again, this leaves only digital ad table scraps for the majority of home-based and small businesses. Despite COVID-19 impacts, search advertising is expected to grow over 65%, to nearly $100 billion by 2024 (eMarketer).
These advertising monopolies started long before search advertising became big. Google’s rigging of online marketing began in 2003 with the creation of their third-party ad network. Embedded into websites, these networks discounted ad unit earnings previously generated through traditional direct banner ad campaigns. These paid directly to website owners through competitive rates for durations of time or banner impressions.
Drives Dysfunctional Culture of “Click-Bait”
Google’s AdSense network consolidated and monopolized this entire online display ad industry. In addition, it discounted the value of website impressions in an ad price race to the bottom. It also drove today’s dysfunctional culture of “click bait” to monetize clicks. This reduced over 30 million websites to being another variety of “Google sharecroppers,” struggling to generate decent ad revenue in an online system rigged in Google’s favor.
Overall, Google’s monopoly over online advertising/marketing revenue has deprived small businesses of tens of billions of dollars since the early 2000’s. Hopefully future antitrust legal actions against Google will claw some of this money back.
Google Harmed Your Business?
Yes, the online monopoly power that Google holds over small businesses is absolute, and incomprehensible. Hopefully, we can break up Google, and it will soon end. If you feel your small business has been harmed by Google’s online monopolies, please email me at publisher@homebusinessmag.com
Great article, Richard.
We all know this is the future, and Google already anticipated this, hence the Alphabet movement. I believe this will be in their interest in the long run, as all the other companies derived from G. will be worth more money separately.
I am not advocating for Google – they have/afford better defense attorneys 🙂 and I certainly believe there’s a tech oligarchy that’s getting too powerful, and we must do something about it.
But I’m an SEO, and I need to advocate for my profession.
The fact of the matter is, there’s no better search engine than Google. I encourage anyone to try that for a week and let me know the results pls.
Second, Google created so many opportunities for offering service in the SEO space – to create jobs and bring the entire world into the economy. I (and many other great people) have jobs in this industry, and our (hard) work changes for the better the life of other small business owners.
“Smaller, less capitalized businesses are at a competitive disadvantage in funding expensive SEO to improve their Google search results and ranking, harming their ability to compete against better SEO’d websites.” – I want to comment a little bit on this statement because I work with several small business owners. I like to think that my work makes a difference in their lives, as I help them generate more business, more money, etc.
Saying that less capitalized businesses are at a disadvantage is equally (my opinion) of saying that the small, less capitalized business should get a break from filling out taxes (not a tax break) because he doesn’t know all the terms and the forms needed, etc.
The taxman doesn’t care if you operate a small or large business – you need to fill out the forms the correct way, in a certain order, by a certain date, and pay your dues accordingly. He doesn’t care that you’re not taught how taxes work in your trade and encourage you to hire an accountant to do them (as you should).
The same thing goes for SEO – if you don’t invest (time at least) in intuitively structuring your website, researching what your audience/prospects want, using the same vocabulary (keywords), having them in your title, metas, ULR and other technical aspects that create a better user experience for the people who land on the website, then why would I (a search engine) show your page as a result for my customers (the people who perform the queries).
Google wants to show its customers the best results possible for their queries. We know the reasons (advertising), but that’s pretty much it. Sounds simple, right? 🙂
Again, I’m not advocating for Google. God knows I have my match with them as an SEO all the time. But SEO can make a small business stand out and help them compete with more prominent brands (I work with clients who get revenue from SEO, although their direct competitors are the Amazons, the Walmarts and the Home Depots).
Hello, All Good points. And on target! The services that Google provides are critical to the online economy, and have generated huge economic value. But the key issue is that no one company should have a monopoly over them; and not be regulated such as a utility. And the company should not be able to rig the market – through that monopoly – so that they get most all the revenue. It’s a race to the bottom.
Thanks for sharing, Richard Henderson