Among the many events that could be remembered in the history of 4 September, one certainly stands out, a very recent one: 21 years ago, on 4 September 1998, a company was founded that changed our way of life forever, to work, learn and communicate with others. This is Google, founded exactly on that day by Larry Page and Sergej Brin, but whose domain had actually already been registered about a year earlier, on September 15, 1997. Among the pioneers of the Internet age, Google has quickly become the most famous and most used search engine in the world, a point of reference of the "digital life" of billions of people, especially in the Western world.
Over the years, its range of activities has gone well beyond cataloging and indexing the resources of the World Wide Web: by now the company also deals with photos, newsgroups, news, maps (Google Maps), email (Gmail), shopping, translations , videos (she became the owner of YouTube), reviews and various programs she created herself. He had also created a social network, Google +, which however officially closed its doors last year.
The story of this company, which in the meantime has become a gold mine (Alphabet Inc., the holding company that includes Google, has a turnover of almost 140 billion dollars today and is the fourth in the world by market capitalization behind Microsoft, Apple and Amazon and ahead of Facebook and Alibaba, but was also ranked first in 2012), has been fascinating since its inception. Starting with the name, Google. According to the official version, the two founders had looked for a name that could represent the ability to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web; therefore they needed a hyperbole.
So they used an already existing name: googol, a term coined by the nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. To Page and Brin, it seemed perfect as a metaphor for the vastness of the web. The two founders intended to call the newborn search engine their own Googol, but at the time of registration, not knowing exactly how to spell it, they decided on "Google". Their colleague at Stanford only warned them the next day of the mistake, but the domain was now registered and they left it that way.
However, in the young and glorious history of Google, the most visited site in the world, there were gray areas: fromuse of the personal data of billions of users (until a few years ago not properly informed) to the never severe enough fight against the spread of fake news, up to tax and judicial disputes in those parts of the world (including Italy and Europe) where Google, as well as other web giants, is accused of somehow circumventing the laws by actually evading a correct payment of taxes in all the countries where it invoices. And also of other types of disputes: in July 2018, for example, the maxi fine of 4,3 billion (the highest ever imposed up to that moment) imposed by the EU for abuse of a dominant position.
In 2017 there was instead the fine of 2,4 billion for comparison and shopping services, while this year Brussels has again fined Google 1,49 billion for violating competition rules: according to the EU, the company has abused its dominant position on the market – with the AdSense platform – by imposing a series of restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites, preventing competitors from placing their advertisements on those sites. Finally, the latest grain of a few days ago: the 200 million fine imposed on YouTube for violating children's privacy.
