Over the past few weeks, there has been big news surrounding the search engine giant, Google, around fair competition. The European Union have deemed that the use of Google’s search engine has been exploited by providing Google’s shopping comparison results a favourable advantage as opposed to competition in the rankings. The parent company of Google, Alphabet, had a 1.5% decrease in its stock’s share price when the news came out. But, ultimately, what does this mean for Google, the parent company Alphabet and us, the public?
#1 Fairer Trading
It is never nice for illegal activities to take place in order to give one company an advantage over the competition. In general, from doing this, the public will be the ones suffering due to the fact that the unfair advantage could promote more expensive and worst-value products/services as opposed to naturally promoted products/services. For this reason, the fact that Google have halted such activity to artificially promote their shopping comparison could see better deals come out of it to the web user.
#2 Alphabet will Bounce Back
Although 1.5% drop in share price does translate as billions lost instantly, it is something that Alphabet nor Google will worry about too much, considering the amazing innovation that occurs within the companies of Alphabet. This can be supported by the share price of Alphabet from the last ten plus years, which shows a general increase year on year – it is probably one of the safest companies to buy shares in.
#3 It’s a Wake Up Call
The news of Google being fined by the EU is a significant wake up call in how to perform business: especially online. From this, we may expect to see a few other businesses change their strategy online in recognition of the fine Google recived for their illegal wrong-doings.
This situation can show similarities to when Volkswagon were found to have a cheat code in their automotive engine strategy to reach the correct emissions when testing and then not the correct emissions when driving on the road. As with the huge fine and bad PR this recieved Volkswagon, many other automotive manufacturers made clear that they did not do this and even pushed away from diesels as well.
For Google, it’s a wake up call that they cannot do what they want because they are the biggest. As much as they can influence how we do things online, there are still rules to abide to, for which the EU have evidently taken up with Google on.
#4 Better Online Experience
Most importantly, what this fine will do will allow the competition for shopping comparison results to go back to how it should be. Companies in the past in this sector had seen sudden drops of up to 92% in traffic, which is, by far, enough to end a company. It is reassuring that things will go back to the way they were before the biased SEO of Google to allow new and emerging companies to saturate the shopping comparison market.
