News and Research articles on Alphabet

Reframing platform power

José van Dijck, Utrecht University
David Nieborg, University of Toronto
Thomas Poell, University of Amsterdam
PUBLISHED ON: 30 Jun 2019 DOI: 10.14763/2019.2.1414

This paper is part of Transnational materialities, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by José van Dijck and Bernhard Rieder. Introduction In March 2019, the European Commission fined Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. 1.5 billion euro for antitrust violations in the online advertising market—the third fine in three years. In July 2018, European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager had levied a record fine of 4.3 billion euro on Google for breaching European competition rules by forcing cell phone manufacturers to pre-install a dozen of the firms’ apps when using Android—Google’s mobile operating system. And in 2016, the company was punished for unlawfully favouring Google …