Google faces monopoly accusations, invests in AI future through data

Google is looking into exploring artificial intelligence through more data but it may need to move past recent controversies to pursue more ventures. According to Russia's biggest search site, Yandex, Google's Android business practice is questionable. This comes on top of the issues the search engine giant is facing in the European Union.

Yandex's complaint against Google can boost the EU's antitrust case. Under the latter, regulators are pushing to charge Google with anti-competitive business practices. This is on top of the controversies linked to its Google Shopping service.

The case was filed originally in April 2015. The EU's stipulations are largely similar to the Russian company's claims in another case. Yandex won the said monopoly case. Now, Russian watchdog Federal Antimonopoly Service, claims that Google violated the law last September since it required the pre-installation of its search application on Android mobile devices.

"We think that the Russian finding of abuse of dominance is instructive, and is a conclusion that can readily be adopted in other jurisdictions, including the EU," Reuters quoted Yandex.

"We hope the European Commission ... offers their help in restoring fair competition and ensuring equal opportunity to pre-install mobile applications on Android-based devices not only for Google, but also for other developers," the company added.

Nonetheless, despite concerns on their business practice, Google is not stopping with its ventures as it sourced its artificial intelligence engine in the previous week. This means the company just shared its code to the rest of the world. Many saw this as a victory for data.

Lukas Biewald, chief executive officer of San Francisco startup CrowdFlower, said that artificial intelligence is a good one.

“As companies become more data-driven, they feel more comfortable open sourcing lots of [software]. They know they’re sitting on lots of proprietary data that nobody else has access to,” Wired quoted Baldwin. In TensorFlow AI engine, Google is keeping the data but it is showing the world that data power AI more than the software or algorithms.

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