Should Google be regulated?

MayCaesar

I do not think monopolies should be regulated. And even so, Google is hardly a monopoly, and in almost every field Google has established its presence, there are serious competitors.

Just because some powerful and influential company has a political bias you dislike, does not mean the principles of free market should suddenly be violated. Brin has built that company from scratch; he has the final say in what bias it is going to have, not you, me or the government.

If someone dislikes the political bias of Google and wants to counter it, they are welcome to build their own company of a similar scope from scratch and introduce the opposite bias to even the scales.

WordsMatter

Absolutely laughable to think Google is anywhere near a Monopoly. I can give you different phone manufacturers, email domains, search engines, map services, video/streaming hosting sites. Google's #2 and #3 most valuable properties are ad services. You don't pull in more money than literally every Google service except for mapping software, by throwing left leaning ads in everyones' face. If you use Google products and you are right leaning you are going to get ads that just conform to your already held views. If the ads aren't biased they aren't slanting their product to the left. The company may be left leaning, but the product certainly isn't.

If you want to talk about the narrative that Google is pushing left leaning sources to the top of searches, or giving negative results to right leaning sources we can get into that algorithm. Just remember the same people in government who made this claim also asked Google why a negative ad for himself popped up on his granddaughters iPhone. An Apple product. The Representatives that sparked this whole line of thinking know little to nothing about technology, let alone how a complex search engine works.

MayCaesar

I also do not see how Google is left-leaning. Does this impression come merely from the fact that the Google management criticized Trump harshly, supported the BLM slogan and censored a couple of Youtube videos? Google is not Facebook; Google cares much more about income, than any political outreach, from what I have seen. Sergey Brin may have his own views, but the company as a whole does not promote any particular political views.

The problems with Google are the same as the problems with any large entity: it becomes so influential that it can get away with many very questionable practices, and the corruption inside such an entity makes customer satisfaction secondary to the practices that please the management. Overly invasive ads, overblown security and control measures, law bending with financial settlements in court, et cetera. 

But the political leaning? Google does not give me an impression of that kind of organization.