In the fall of 2018, we noticed that there was something that set Google apart from other big tech companies. Everybody was talking about how to regulate these tech companies, and everybody had pretty good plans for how to do it — for every company besides Google. In our opinion, it was because nobody really seemed to understand what Google does, or how they do it. So, for the past two years, we’ve been researching and analyzing Google. Through this work, we’ve found some really compelling evidence about what powers Google’s monopoly, so much so that Congress referenced this work as part of their recently released Big Tech Antitrust Report. The big ideas that we have is that that crawling the web is a natural monopoly, that Google has control of that monopoly, and that once you understand why this is true and what it means it becomes pretty clear about what sorts of regulations should be taken to reign in Google’s power over the internet.
We have published on this website the economic arguments that we have developed that we think help people understand the foundations of Google and how to regulate them. Up until now we have done all this work in private, reaching out to and meeting with regulators on an individual basis. With the publishing of an article about this work in The New York Times, we are publishing this research for everyone to read and opening up the club for people to join and participate in researching Google’s monopoly. We have a solid plan for the next year about how to finish this research and work with legislators and governments to get legislation drafted and introduced to regulate Google’s web crawling advantages. If you find yourself agreeing with what you read on this website and get caught up imagining a better future where the internet isn’t just five big tech companies all cutting deals with each other, please consider joining the Knuckleheads’ Club and helping us fight to win a better world.
So, with all that said as an introduction, let’s dive into what Google is exactly.