GOOGLE'S DATA GONDOLA : HONOURS ESSAY

MAGICAL VISION : WHAT A GREAT TIME TO BE GOOGLE. Not only is it facing only the meekest of punishment for abusing its monopoly of the search market, it is actually now positioned to further entrench its dominance of our information land scape.

AS THE WORLD'S dominant '' information gatekeeper '', Google has the power to suppress or make inaccessible any information it wants -something it already does around the world..........

Including in Thailand, where it blocks content critical of the King, and in Vietnam, where it takes down videos that oppose the government.

On its maps, the company has already changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, Mr. Trump's preferred nomenclature.

It was just the undeterred market power that prompted Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last year to find Google guilty of being an illegal monopolist.

It's a scating opinion, he hinted that he might force the company to spin off its web browser Chrome or its mobile operating system Android and would most likely require Google to stop paying billions of dollars to ensure that its search engine is the default on cellphones and web browsers.

YET this month, Judge Mehta surprisingly concluded that these remedies were unnecessary.

Accepting Google's argument that it is already facing stiff competition from a host of A.I. search companies, he decided it would be enough to require Google only to open up its search data to rivals to help them build their own search engines.

The judge correctly grasped that even well-funded rivals cannot compete with Google's vast lead in the search without having access to some of its data.

But he made the terms of data sharing so restrictive that I doubt any meaningful competition will arise from it.

Google has to share only a limited amount of data in discrete batches over six years, rather than in the frequent access that competitors say they need.

EVEN the best-funded A.I. models will not be able to build a viable competitor without frequent access to Google's data. 

Google has an unassailable lead in collecting and analyzing data from across the web, and it is constantly crawling the web to update its search engine.

Websites welcome Google's scrapers because they want to show up in Google's results - but then they block A.I. companies from doing the same.

This Master Essay Publishing continues. The World Students Society thanks Juia Angwin for her Opinion.