By Nicolas Shaxson, Technology & Human Rights Fellow 2025-26, and Brianna Rock
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Google has over six thousand companies in its direct orbit – and counting.
Our digital and analog lives have become increasingly saturated by Google, as it inserts itself into our experience with shopping, cars, entertainment, and even our schools. It would be reassuring to know that our market regulators are at least keeping track of its reach.
One way to monitor the expansion of big tech firms is to look at the companies they have been able influence through acquisitions or investments. In a new paper co-authored with Aline Blankertz and Brianna Rock, entitled “Google’s Hidden Empire,” we examine the scale of Google’s influence through these methods -- and find surprising results.
It may seem at first glance that the concerns about big tech firms’ acquisitive behavior might be overblown. Using Pitchbook data, we found that while Google, Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Apple and Microsoft acquired 96 companies between them in 2014 (of which Google acquired 39) this tally fell steadily and by 2024 had collapsed, with just three acquisitions for Google, plus nine for the other four big tech firms combined.
Yet this decline masks a more dramatic trend in the other direction. Our paper offers striking new evidence that Google’s corporate involvement in the digital economy is far deeper than had previously been understood – and off the charts when compared to its big tech peers.
Acquisitions involve a change of control. Yet when we look at ‘investments’, when Google acquires minority stakes in companies without taking control, a very different reality becomes apparent. As Google’s rate of acquisitions has fallen, its rate of investments, through its venture capital arms such as Google for Startups, has exploded. Google’s investments grew from just 20 in the year 2010, to a peak of 743 in 2022, falling back slightly to a still-extensive 608 in 2024, the last year for which we had data.
All in all, we count over 9,500 investments by big tech firms, of which Google accounted for nearly 5,900, over sixty percent. If you add Google’s more than 250 acquisitions, that means Google acquired or invested in over 6,000 companies through to 2024.
The meaning of Google’s Hidden Empire
The precise logics and purposes of these many deals are too varied to unfold here, but the general logic can be spelled out in four words: “surveillance capitalism,” and “monopoly power.” The main source of Google’s profits is the data it harvests from its expanding array of operations: one might think of Google in this respect, perhaps, as the owner of a long mechanical cartoon arm, reaching into the players in its orbit and flicking switches, so that each channels more data to Google to feed its profitable surveillance machinery.
Google’s unexpectedly large direct involvement in digital ecosystems, that we documented, adds to existing knowledge about the rising scale of Google’s activities, its monopolistic powers of market dominance, and its “instrumentarian power” of behavioral control as documented by Shoshana Zuboff and others. Cecilia Rikap has also described a phenomenon of Intellectual Monopoly (IM) capitalism, where companies do not merely coexist with others in the information ecosystems they inhabit: they co-evolve and co-produce innovation – yet with, as she notes, a large fly in this ointment: “Innovation is here an outcome of heterogeneous actors’ mutual activity while the company exercising the IM captures the bulk of associated rents.” Google also uses its power to capture knowledge from universities and open-source collaborations, and elsewhere, to feed its purposes.
This is power and reach unlike anything in history – and our regulators have barely dented it.
Regulators’ blind spots?
Our paper begins with a warning about Google’s latest, and largest ever proposed acquisition – its $32 billion deal to buy the Israeli multi-cloud cybersecurity firm Wiz. This deal has been cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice, though it remains under review by the European Commission. If finally concluded, this acquisition will enable Google to build further power not only within its own cloud ecosystem, but also into the clouds of its biggest rivals, notably Microsoft and Amazon. As cybersecurity necessarily involves intrusive surveillance of client systems, the access to corporate data afforded by Wiz’s technology, both on Google cloud and on its rivals’ clouds, could deliver especially valuable volumes and categories of new corporate data to Google.
We ask why regulators in Europe and the United States have failed to address Google’s dominance, or to tackle the ensuing harms. For example, when the European Commission unconditionally cleared Google’s landmark acquisition in 2007 of the advertising tech firm DoubleClick, it argued that Google had neither the incentive nor the ability to monopolize the advertising technology stack, the high-tech digital machinery that connects online publishers with advertisers. Yet as multiple court cases have since shown, their judgement was faulty: Google went on to monopolize that very stack – and to use its ensuing power to destroy rivals and inflict multiple harms across our economies and societies.
Digging into why regulators fell short, we explore a narrow but dominant competition paradigm that prioritizes Chicago-School “Industrial Organization” (IO) economics reasoning, a discipline that, especially in the hands of essentially unregulated private economics consultancies and well-paid academic practitioners, has proven itself as an ideal toolkit to hobble regulators and enforcers. By “spamming the regulator” with complexity and setting them almost insurmountable “IO obstacle courses” these IO practices have had the practical effect of blocking enforcement.
Now, in this era of new geopolitics where the US administration weaponizes the power of big tech firms like Google to serve as an arm of U.S. state power overseas, it is incumbent on the European Commission to block the Wiz transaction. Yet the Commission remains in thrall to the same disempowering IO logic and system as before – so at this stage at least, we see little prospect of a European backbone emerging soon.
