Marcel Machill, a journalism professor at the Leipzig and Dortmund universities, has claimed that as the one company which dominates 70% of the German go-to market for information, Google has an unprecedented power which would be "unthinkable" in the classic media sectors. Adding comments on the importance of there being effective checks and balances on Google's ability to control the supply of information, Machill's views again return us to this question: how realistic it is for individual governments to 'police' the web?
In Germany, Google (along with Yahoo! and MSN) control 90% of the search market, and each of them have a responsibility not to allow access to sites of an illegal nature - which includes websites such as those with neo-Nazi content which is forbidden in Germany. Whilst each subsidiary of search engines like Google have a obligation to screen their search results for violent or x-rated material, Machill argues that governments need to be aware of how the search engine companies operate in order to effectively regulate them.
Norbert Schneider, director of the North Rhine Westphalia state media institute also backed up Machill's comments, adding that this voluntary obligation is not enough and governments need to be taking the lead to make sure the power of search engines is clear to web surfers.
These comments come in the wake of France's plans to spearhead a new European search engine in spite of Google and Yahoo!'s dominance in the market. The French search engine would be dedicated to reducing the omnipresence of US culture in French society. French president Jacques Chirac recently claimed that the power that companies like Google had over French internet users was akin to a threat from Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism.
This European search engine, dubbed "Project Quaero" (meaning "to seek") is still far from completion and is thus unproven in the market, but commentators like Machill are already suggesting that a major European engine is what's needed to counter the big three US engines' current global domination.
However, Google themselves claim that there's no need for added regulation to be applied to their results because they're all created by mathematical formula - and the only results that can be bought are labelled as advertisements. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that as search engines like Google and Yahoo! grow and find new and innovative ways of making their search engine 'sticky' - meaning able to keep the users on-site - for their users, a new engine will start far behind in any race for serving the most popular search results.
So it seems whilst German commentators and the French government might be adamant about the need for added regulation and greater choice, there's no concrete evidence as yet to suggest that the current 70% of German users going straight to Google will have any inclination to change their searching habits anytime soon.
