Advertising and search engine giant, Google recently revealed that it was looking into
joining the wireless service market.
This small, but ambitious project follows their pattern of acquiring existing services
like YouTube and Picasa, and dominating the market.
Google’s ubiquitous, multi-service platform has raised questions about their influence,
even beyond the scope of the Internet.
So, how powerful is Google?
Well, for a company with a $66 billion revenue in 2014, and more than 53,000 employees, Google
has the ability to fund and research a large number of diverse projects.
And while a number of its experiments fall flat, like Google Wave, and some don’t turn
a profit, like Google Glass, they do help Google expand their reach.
Google’s wide success in the smartphone wars with their operating system, Android,
is proof of their ability to take on existing markets.
They’re even doing a better job than most governments at: following the global arms
trade, alerting users of local crises, tracking the spread of disease and fighting international
censorship.
In response to China’s blocking of certain political search results, Google redirected
Chinese users to the less censored Hong Kong site.
Enraged Chinese officials enacted a total ban on Google, but lifted it the next day.
Following revelations that the NSA was spying on Internet traffic in 2013, Google quickly
called out the responsible agencies over social media, and began encrypting their searches.
Google’s potential political impact cannot be overlooked.
In India, researchers found that an undecided voter’s opinion could be swayed towards
one candidate or another based on their ranking in Google’s search results.
Google maintains that they have never manipulated search rankings to influence users.
However, Google was the 5th biggest political lobbyist in 2013, and the third largest donor
to the Obama campaign.
Google’s revenue and employment is on the rise, and they’ve made significant inroads
in energy, transportation, artificial intelligence and a whole array of tech services.
All this means that Google is an indispensable global player in politics, technology, and
new media.
In fact, when Google servers went down for less than five minutes last year, global traffic
fell by 40%, showing just how powerful the Internet giant truly is.
Have you ever wondered why big internet companies censor explicit material like porn?
Well, there’s a lot of reasons, and some might even surprise you.
There’s a link to that full video in the description.
Check it out.
Thank you for watching TestTube!