Who Wins in a Show Down: Companies or Countries?
February 8, 2020
Do not be surprised, but Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, is getting bigger! Alphabet Inc. is becoming so big that is creating a monopoly in everything it touches. Matt Stoller’s blog BIG, which investigates the history of monopolies, discusses, “Google’s Dangerous Monopoly-Based Foreign Policy.”
In early December 2019, Google told its Turkish business partners that they would no longer support Android phones in Turkey. This decision comes after the Turkish competition board ruled that Google’s changes to contract were not acceptable and asked Google to change its software distribution agreements so users could select which search engine they wanted to use on their OS. Google’s response is similar to what the US ordered Google to stop working with Huawei over security concerns.
The Turkish injunction was filed by Russian competitor Yandex. Google has tried to kill Yandex before by leveraging desktop search dominance, then morphing it into mobile search dominance and Google rose to the top. Russia does not bow to US corporations, so they filed the complaint in Turkey. The European Union discovered Google did the same thing in their countries, but the EU did not have a big search engine to rival Google like Yandex. The EU also allowed Google to create their own solution, which they now acknowledge as a mistake.
Google does not like opposition:
“Google’s response wasn’t just to use the legal system to fight for its rights, but then ultimately obey the law. Instead, Google said it was willing to ‘work with’ Turkey, but as a partner and not as a corporation working within a sovereign nation. It simply said it doesn’t like Turkey’s law, and so it will stop providing Android phones for an entire country. In other words, Google has a private sanctions regime against smaller countries.
There’s something of a parallel to what Google is doing to Turkey, and it’s in China. The U.S. government ordered Google to stop delivering apps to Huawei, and the result is a catastrophe for any attempt to build phones for use outside of China.”
A clash of big companies and big countries seems to be taking place.
Whitney Grace, February 8, 2020
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