Does it benefit everyone?
Google is huge. They have answers to everything and the fact that a verb, to google, has derived from their name is an indicator as strong as any on how much the search engine has grown over the last years and what position they have in this field. As with any really big player in any given market, they now have the possibility to take lead and in a way decide the direction of development. I mean, the Internet is theirs. One has to remember that Google is a profit-driven, huge corporation with the intentions, like any other profit-driven corporation, to maximize their winnings.
Jesse Stay writes about the term ”open” now is nothing more than a marketing term, and that it is not a bad thing, just reality. I’m not sure whether or not it is all good or all bad, but it is for sure not all that common to have any one company dominate a market in this way, offline that is.
Online though, it is not surprising that we have one dominant search engine, since it seems to be a pattern we follow. We have one dominant online encyclopedia, social service, auction site, etc and these companies have grown huge. But what happens when they grow to large?
As anyone who uses social media would argue, decentralization is good, it is democratic and it leaves people with more choices. But when companies we believe stands for just this grow to big, will it lead to a more centralized web again? Who will stand as the real beneficiary in the end? And is this something we should worry about or could we really rely on, say, Google to make the right choices for us if we get disenfranchised by their growth?
