Identify the Type of Market Structure for “google”. Does It Really a Monopoly in Internet Search Market?

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Course Name              : PRINCIPLES OF ECONOMICS I

Course Code               : SEM 101

Lecturer                      : Lee Weng Chang

Student ID                  : 1) FIN1709816                2) FIN1709759                
                               3) FIN1709766                4) IBU1709854

Full Name                  : 1) Michael Ting Seaa Kai        2) Chi Zhau Hung
                              3) Chong Kar Chun                4) Toh Shin Ying

Submission Date        : 8th DEC 2017

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Date: 8th December 2017

Q1 – Identify the type of market structure for “Google”. Does it really a monopoly in internet search market?

Google is one of the most famous brand/company in the world. It was created in September 1997. When Google was born, the internet was just starting to grow and there were a few companies that specialised for storing data in servers. With the help of search engines, they could easily search for information on the internet. However, none of the companies was able to completely monopolise the market. A monopoly is when the seller faces no competition due to it being the sole seller of a specific product. But in the real world that would rarely happen. So being a monopoly in the real world is to dominate the industry/market even though there might be smaller companies. Many label Google as a monopoly while others have different opinions.

According to Edward (2017), Google have been fined €2.4 Billion for abusing its monopoly power in Europe. From this we can see that Google is a big monopoly in Europe. Not just that, Google have around 80.6% of the market share for search engine (Netmarketshare 2017). The reason why people says that Google is a monopoly because it has a huge amount of data base and allowing almost everyone to be able to search about close to almost all the information that is on the internet. It is also due to this that Google is more preferable to people compared to other search engines (Cooper 2017). With these, we can see that there are facts about Google being a monopoly. However, there are also counter agreement for it.