In August this year, a US court in Washington DC ruled that Google acted illegally to crush its competition and maintain a monopoly on online search and related advertising. This is just one of a number of lawsuits that have been filed against the big tech companies, as US antitrust authorities attempt to strengthen competition in the industry. Now Google is facing another legal case in Virginia, USA, over its advertising technology. Whilst in Europe it has been fined billions in monopoly cases. Google themselves dispute they are a ‘monopolist’ and presented evidence in the US court case in August to show that they face ‘fierce competition from a broad range of competitors’. The court did find Google’s search to be ‘superior’ to its competitors. And Google’s executives say consumers stick with them because they find Google ‘helpful’. Google is everywhere in our online lives and it handles billions of search queries every day, so on this week’s Inquiry, we’re asking ‘Can we trust Google?’ Contributors: David Vise, Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist and Author of ‘The Google Story’, New York, USA Professor Douglas Melamed, Visiting Fellow, Stanford Law School, Washington, DC. USA Jonathan Stray, Senior Scientist, UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, California, USA Cristina Caffarra, Independent Expert Economist, Honorary Professor, UCL, London, UK Presenter: David Baker Producer: Jill Collins Researcher: Matt Toulson Editor: Tara McDermott Technical Producer: Nicky Edwards Broadcast Co-ordinator: Jacqui Johnson Image Credit: Reuters/Steve Marcus
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Welcome to the inquiry.
Each week, one question, four expert witnesses, and an answer.
Google is everywhere in our online lives.
Every day it handles billions of search queries and it's become one of the biggest companies in the world.
It began as a super innovative startup with a strong sense of ethics, but recently it's come under fire.
In August this year, a court in Washington D.C.
ruled that Google had been abusing its dominant position in search market, making life almost impossible for its competitors.
The judge has yet to announce what penalties the company will face, but many feel it's become just too big to control.
And that could mean we're going to have to rely on Google itself to use its power more responsibly.
So this week on the inquiry, we're asking, can we Trust Google?
Part 1 How Google became King Google is everywhere in our lives.
So much so that it's hard to imagine a time when it was just an idea in the minds of two California university students.
It came about because two young blokes, both working on their PhDs at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were not satisfied with the quality of Internet search.
Our first witness is David Vyse, author of the Google Story, and someone who's been following the rise of the company since the start.
This was back in the late 1990s and before Google, there was Yahoo search and AltaVista search.
Those were the two most widely used.
They didn't rank anything in terms of its importance.