The aim of this paper will be to evaluate the political economy of google. Google is the most widely used web page on the internet. This fact has enabled the company become one of the biggest in the World. With online users increasing by the day combined with the number of websites and webpages, the influence of google continues to grow by the minute. Apart from web searches, the company has devised systems and ways that users can not only search, but also organize store and analyze data. The company has an omnipresent influence in our daily lives. Google is also influencing our perception of culture and politics. Google is giving its users exposure thus influencing how they think (Girard, 2009).
An analysis into google as a company through political economic lens will assist us in understanding its sheer influence in how individuals conduct their daily lives through thoughts and actions shaped by this “big company.” Google makes its profit through various products and services, they include: search engine (Google), Advertising tools (Adclick, Ad words, Google Analytics), Productivity Tools (Gmail), Enterprise products (Google Drive, Calendar). Its core business can be summarized as the selling of keywords, keyword statistics and search results (Becker, 2009).
An analysis into google as a company will analyze the impact of these products and services and their value to the economy. The value of this company is driven by its users, as the more users it has the bigger it becomes and this has led to the criticism that the company sells its users to advertisers. Through having a large user base, the company has been able to take advantage of its users without paying them for their services. This analysis will be of crucial importance to the debate surrounding the political economy of the Internet-debate (Jarvis, 2009).
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- Girard, B. (2009). The Google Way. How One Company is Revolutionizing Management as we Know It. San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press.
- Jarvis, J. (2009). What Would Google Do? New York: HarperCollins.
