Related papers: Google's Chrome Antitrust Paradox
This paper presents striking new data about the scale of Google's involvement in the global digital and corporate landscape, head and shoulders above the other big tech firms. While public attention and some antitrust scrutiny has focused…
Is Google Search a monopoly with gatekeeping power? Regulators from the US, UK, and Europe have argued that it is based on the assumption that Google Search dominates the market for horizontal (a.k.a. "general") web search. Google disputes…
E-Commerce challenges traditional approaches to assessing monopolistic practices due to the rapid rate of growth, rapid change in technology, difficulty in assessing market share for information products like web sites, and high degree of…
In digital markets, antitrust law and special regulations aim to ensure that markets remain competitive despite the dominating role that digital platforms play today in everyone's life. Unlike traditional markets, market participant…
Surfing on the internet boom, the digital marketing industry has seen an exponential growth in the recent years and is often at the origin of the financial success of the biggest tech firms. In this paper we study the current landscape of…
The concentration of power in a few digital technology companies has become a subject of increasing interest in both academic and non-academic discussions. One of the most noteworthy contributions to the debate is Lina Khan's Amazon's…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
The power of digital platforms is at the center of major ongoing policy and regulatory efforts. To advance existing debates, we designed and executed an experiment to measure the performative power of online search providers. Instantiated…
Integrating Google's Topics API into the digital advertising ecosystem represents a significant shift toward privacy-conscious advertising practices. This article analyses the implications of implementing Topics API on ad networks, focusing…
The targeted direct-to-customer marketing of unapproved stem cell treatments by a questionable online industry is directed at vulnerable users who search the Internet in the hope of a cure. This behavior especially poses a threat to…
Web browsers have been used widely by users to conduct various online activities, such as information seeking or online shopping. To improve user experience and extend the functionality of browsers, practitioners provide mechanisms to allow…
Digital platforms use recommendations to facilitate exchanges between platform actors, such as trade between buyers and sellers. Aiming to protect consumers and guarantee fair competition on platforms, legislators increasingly require that…
Search engine results often misalign with users' goals due to opaque algorithms, leading to unhelpful or detrimental information consumption. To address this, we developed a Google Chrome plugin that provides "content labels" for webpages…
The modern web is increasingly characterized by the pervasiveness of Surveillance Capitalism. This investigation employs an empirical approach to examine this phenomenon through the web tracking practices of major tech companies --…
The Privacy Sandbox, launched in 2019, is a series of proposals from Google to reduce ``cross-site and cross-app tracking while helping to keep online content and services free for all''. Over the years, Google implemented, experimented,…
Search engines play a crucial role as digital gatekeepers, shaping the visibility of Web and social media content through algorithmic curation. This study investigates how search engines like Google selectively promotes or suppresses…
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
Free content and services on the Web are often supported by ads. However, with the proliferation of intrusive and privacy-invasive ads, a significant proportion of users have started to use ad blockers. As existing ad blockers are radical…
This editorial explores the significance of research visibility within the evolving landscape of academic communication, mainly focusing on the role of search engines as online meta-markets shaping the impact of research. With the rapid…