Is Google too big?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is the search engine's share of our attention and our data too dominant, and should regulators step in and break their business up? Ed Butler gets to pitch these and other questions to Google's former chairman Eric Schmidt.
Google, along with other Silicon Valley leviathans such as Facebook, Amazon and Apple, faces increasing criticism from commentators, regulators and politicians for its monopolistic power. Among them is the tech journalist Franklin Foer of The Atlantic magazine, who tells Ed that the political tide is now turning against big tech in the US.
(Picture: The Google logo is reflected in the eye of a girl; Credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there. I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, I get to talk to a Google grandee. Is it time that Silicon Valley tech giants, like Google, accepted they were stifling competition? When you are a big company like the companies you're describing, in my view, they have a special |
| 0:21.9 | responsibility to get things right because they play an outsized role in whatever aspect of the |
| 0:27.9 | world they deal with. And they also make mistakes. Today, we examine the wider case for breaking |
| 0:32.7 | up the world's favorite search engine. In the United States, 88% of all searches begin with Google. |
| 0:40.5 | And so Google, by dint of where it sits, has this ability to pick the winners and losers in the |
| 0:46.7 | world. Time to Google it down to size? That's Business Daily from the BBC. The debate has raged for some years now. |
| 0:56.8 | Are the big tech firms, household names like Google, Facebook, Amazon and others? |
| 1:00.9 | Are they simply too big, too all-embracing for the areas of industry that they occupy? |
| 1:06.5 | Should they, in fact, be broken up? |
| 1:08.8 | In the wake of controversies about fake news, privacy breaches, |
| 1:12.4 | voter manipulation, you name it, it is a thought that more and more people are embracing. |
| 1:28.3 | The tech giants are better, the bigger, the better The bigger, better The bigger, the better. |
| 1:33.4 | The tech giants are exploiting the public's poor understanding of software To destroy markets while creating few jobs, |
| 1:37.2 | paying a fraction of the tax they should, |
| 1:39.3 | and generating no new creative content. |
| 1:41.7 | We have failed to enforce our antitrust laws. |
| 1:43.9 | Facebook enjoys the power that it does today, in part because it was allowed to buy up |
| 1:48.0 | Instagram. It was allowed to buy up WhatsApp. |
| 1:50.6 | Digital marketing. That's the future. That's where the growth is. |
| 1:53.5 | But guess what? Two companies own 103% of the growth, meaning if you're in digital marketing, |
| 1:58.0 | you're not Facebook or Google, your business is a structural decline. |
| 2:01.5 | Someone like Amazon runs a platform. |
... |
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