Trump’s attack on Google

It is a great way for the US stock market that the market hovers after US-Mexico trade breakthrough and extends its longest bull period; however, it is not a good day for Alphabet, the parent company of Google. On Tuesday morning, President Trump attacked Google on Twitter and suggested Google’s “leftwing media bias”; and even worse, Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser, later said that the administration was taking a look at whether Google’s search results should be regulated by the government. Such news is negatively a piece of downside news as companies always hate more regulations, especially targeting regulations. Many tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, are struggling to find the right balance between upholding free speech and filtering false or offensive content; however, in the US, the first amendment does not apply for private companies that private companies have the right to restrict their contents, so they cannot be prosecuted for restricting people’s freedom of speech at the moment. Moreover, I do not expect that the US government can make any effective regulation to manipulate the contents.

Though Trump cannot produce effective regulations to manipulate these tech companies’ contents, it shows that people can be unsatisfied about what they see from the contents of Google. Of course, Google and other tech companies use advanced algorithm to guess people’s expectations about what they want to see. Such algorithm is made based on people’s history, more history information is recorded, a better guess the algorithm can make. However, privacy is another big argument within our society that the EU has amended the policy regulation many times in order to protect users’ privacy. Customers need to balance their privacy protection and service quality; but many of them do not realise such problem that they want to protect their privacy as well as want convenient services. Here comes a question if it is possible for these tech companies to provide convenient services while protecting customers’ privacy.

It is not entirely impossible especially in where these tech giants have a long history of operation. When a tech company has already collected enough data, it is possible to run algorithm to predict the products their customers want based on historical data. However, using such method, these tech giants cannot design products that specifically target individual customers, they can only design products that match the demand of the majority of customers; therefore, in order to differentiate products and generate maximum profits, these tech companies always want to gather as much of their customers’ information as possible. If Google could collect enough of Trump’s information, while Trump was googling his news online, he would get the news he wanted and he would not have made any complaint on Twitter.