KATHARINA PISTOR
When confronting the choice between truth and power, Shakespeare’s Hamlet poses his famous existential question: “To be or not to be?” The search for an answer will confront heroes and villains alike with the prospect of death or despair.
Like Shakespeare’s tragedy, battles over the infrastructure that everyone uses to search the internet are also steeped in intrigue and abuse of power. The villain is Google, which is not only a search engine, a company, and a brand, but also a verb. “To search is to Google,” noted a witness in the recent antitrust case brought by the US government and 38 state attorneys general against Google.
On August 5, a federal judge handed down a verdict of “liable.” Google was found to have engaged in unlawful conduct as a monopoly in two markets, including – most critically – the one for general-search services. The remedies have yet to be announced, but commentators are already speculating that the case will reshape internet search.
No comments:
Post a Comment