Media company admits to being afraid of Google
Olivia Solon wrote on Ars Technica that a major European media company has concerns about the growing power of Google.
From the article:
The chief executive of Axel Springer, one of Europe’s largest media publishers, has said that his company is afraid of the power that Google has accumulated and worries that the search giant is becoming a “superstate,” immune from regulation.
Mathias Döpfner published an open letter to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which he points out that Google is not only the largest search engine in the world, but the largest video platform, the largest browser, and the most used e-mail service and mobile operating system. The open letter was published as a response to a guest column written by Schmidt in the same newspaper.
Döpfner goes on to talk about the “schizophrenic” relationship between Axel Springer and Google. On one hand the publisher is part of a European antitrust lawsuit against the search giant, while it also relies on Google’s traffic and ad revenue. “We know of no alternative that even begins to offer similar technological requirements for automated advertising sales, and we cannot do without this source of income,” he says.
He refers to a case where a change to Google’s algorithm led to a drop in traffic to an Axel Springer subsidiary of 70 percent: “This is a real case. And that subsidiary is a competitor of Google… I am sure it is a coincidence.”
“We are afraid of Google,” he added.
Read the full article here
Döpfner brings up some good points to how far the Google octopus can reach, he also points out the quagmire many companies find themselves in, they rely on Google for traffic and revenue with no alternative to match Google.
Millions of people share every facet of their life in some form or another with Google.
