Ethical Failure and Transformation of the Economic Model of Alphabet

Business Ethics: Alphabet
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Business Ethics: Alphabet
Alphabet is a conglomerate that comprises diverse business companies, with Google being the largest of them all. When the company came into existence, Larry Page was the company’s CEO, while Sergey was the president (Page, n.d.). The two settled for the name Alphabet because a collection of letters represents language, which is one of the most crucial innovations by humankind. The companies that formed Alphabet engaged in business activities that were far afield and unrelated. For instance, Life Sciences worked on contact lenses that sense glucose, while Calico focused on longevity. The CEO and the president intended, from the outset, to give strong leaders autonomy to bring about prosperity in their businesses. The two also pledged to be at hand to ensure the leaders get capital allocation to facilitate excellent execution by the different companies. According to the former CEO, the fundamental goal of the new company was to become cleaner, more accountable, and better. They also intended to improve transparency and oversight of the company’s activities (Page, n.d.). More importantly, they hoped the company would improve the lives of as many people as possible. To make their objectives realistic, the two leaders oversaw that each company had an able and well-remunerated CEO.
The two leaders wanted to use the new structure to focus on the tremendous opportunities they had inside Google. Regarding the overall leadership of Alphabet, Page and Sergey settled for Sundar Pichai as the new CEO (Page, n.d.). Page described Sundar as an exceptionally talented person who would steer the company to new horizons by focusing on innovation. The former CEO expressed confidence that Sundar would help the company realize its objective of organizing the world’s information. Before handing over the reins of leadership to the new leader, the former CEO also rolled out Alphabet’s strategic plan. He intimated that the company. He intimated that the company would engage in new undertakings, such as an X lab and drone efforts. He also revealed that Alphabet Inc. would replace Google Inc. as a publicly-traded company.
Ethical Failure
In 2017, competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager found Google guilty of using its own comparison shopping service to attain an unfair advantage over smaller European companies. She consequently fined the company a whopping 2.42 billion Euros (Aulner & Chee, 2021). Google appealed against the decision and lost in 2021. According to the commission, the company had grossly violated the antitrust policy, which regulates competition. It had favored its own online display advertising technology services. This was detrimental to other providers of advertising technology services and online publishers (European Commission, 2021). Competitors contended that Google did not facilitate fairness nor provide a level-playing ground in the supply chain. Some of the accusations that confronted Google included imposing restrictions on the ability of third parties to access user identity data or behavior. The company had also planned to prohibit the disp...