Fining of Google by the European Union (EU) Business & Marketing Essay
Every month, week and day ethical issues are addressed in the media. Television and media reports, popular press magazines, newspapers and social media are mediums through which we become aware of many ethical issues and reflects the evolving relationship we as members of society have with the media.
The purpose of this assignment is to identify and analyze an ethical issue highlighted in the media.
Sections in your paper should include:
1. Introduction and Summary of the media event you have chosen. This section should identify what event you will be discussing, how it relates to course topics and what your paper will address. This section should highlight your familiarity with the event you have chosen and the responses by key actors. Include an overview of the key stakeholders and their responses to the situation. To avoid bias, this section should include multiple sources.
2. Analyze the response by the main/key actors involved in the media event you have chosen. Analyzing the response should include how the situation was handled and how it relates to the crisis management process. A good response sufficiently relates and discusses the ethical issue highlighted in the media to the steps of crisis management.
3. Assessment of the company response based on what was presented in the previous section. Did the company handle the event appropriately? Could/should they have done something different? If so, what?
4. Conclusion
5. References in APA formatting (a minimum of five references are required for this assignment)
this is the link to the topic
https://www(dot)theverge(dot)com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-eu-fine-antitrust
Business ethics
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Business Ethics
The internet is one of the best sources for information, and this largely illustrated by the level of integration most of the traditions services have done over the years. Ideally, the internet forms that basis for sharing information from social to corporate and government levels. While the level of efficiency has greatly improved, there have been challenges along the way and some of them have very subtle impacts at the personal and even societal levels (Warren, 2018). At the helm of the information sharing platforms, are the ethical issues associated with them. This is more so given that even the world’s largest and most influential Tech Company, Google, has been rocked with such issues. To this effect, Google was fined an estimated $ 5 billion dollars by the EU in the grounds that it had been involved in activities that were considered unethical (Vivarelli, 2018). The company was given a hefty fine following reports that it had broken the antitrust laws (Warren, 2018). This is a food example of the ethical issues magnitude that most of the countries are grappling with as well as the users of such services. Over the years, issues of ethics associated with such companies dominate the markets using scrupulous methods to stay ahead of the competition have been rampant. This means that stakeholders in the field are put at a disadvantage by a dominating company, and this leads to unhealthy competition.
In the recent developments where google was fined by the EU for takin part in what was deemed breaking the antitrust laws, this marks a step in the right direction as far as controlling business ethics at the highest levels of the market. It is important to note that, Google the magnitude of the services it offers in the market is a staggering giant (Warren, 2018). Using its influence to muscle the stakeholders into submission is rather unethical not just for the other companies but also for the users.
There are three issues that the company was fined for and these include the fact that the company has been bundling their search engine as well as Chrome apps into operating systems, blocking phone making companies from creating forked versions of Android and making to large manufacturers along with mobile network operators to only bundle Google search app in the handsets (Rankin, 2018). This is a move that will see Google stop forcing other phone manufacturers and operators to include Google search engine on the phones so that they could have a chance to be given rights to use the Google Pay Store. Some of the companies that have filed their complaints leading to the verdict by the EU include Nokia, Microsoft and Oracle. These are competitors in their own right to the tech giant and have indicated that Google has been using its market monopoly to push them out of the competition. It is quite interesting to also note that, this is not the first time the company has been slapped with a fine. Last year, the company had been fined an estimated $2.7 billion dollars for having manipulative search results on their search engine (Warren, 2018). This also counts as one of the ethical issues that the company has been involved in and one that paints a grim picture of the extent to which the company has been involved in such incidences that may not have come to light.
In reference to the latest issue, the company has been creating an unfair advantage for its affiliated services on devices, which means that the phone makers are tied to company options of an operating system. By extension this is an issue that not only affects the phone makers, it also affects the users of the phones. In the case of the phone manufacturers, they could have options where they sell their devices with other forked versions of the operating system but relative to the fact that they are tied to one operating system, they do not have the sedge to create a diverse ecosystem of their own. In the case of the users, there is a very limited element of choice when it comes to the operating systems that they have access to (Burgess, 2018). It is not just the operating system that limits the element of consumers’ preferences but also the search engine in question. This is in reference to the fact that, the Google search engine is the only that they have which comes bundled in operating systems. As such, Google is not only limiting the freedom of the consumers to experience with other operating systems, they are also limiting the search results that they can interact with (Warren, 2018). Citing the fact that, the company has ...