Opera founder describes Google as a monopoly

PanARMENIAN.Net - As calls for increased regulation on the all-consuming power of Google grow louder, the founder of the Opera browser is stepping into the fray. Jon von Tetzchner claims that Google has grown into a monopoly that’s making life hell for his development team by using “anti-competitive practices” and making “unreasonable demands” for inclusion in its ad network, Gizmodo says.

With Opera, Tetzchner and his team created one of the earliest free web browsers and to this day it’s the fifth most popular browser in the world. But fifth place doesn’t mean a lot in a world dominated by Google. Chrome gobbles up 54 percent of the market and Opera is hanging onto just 4 percent of the pie. But these days, Tetzchner is focused on building the Vivaldi browser and he claims that Google has mysteriously given him a lot of trouble.

In a blog post, Tetzchner speaks warmly of the early days when Google was determined to not be evil. He says that Opera was the first browser to integrate Google search directly into its interface and for a time it was a wonderful partnership. But as the search giant grew beyond anyone’s expectations, he says that Google began to expand and refused to play nice.

The first sign of trouble, according to Tetzchner, was when Google introduced its Docs suite of office applications that wouldn’t work with the Opera browser. He says that this forced his company to hide its identity so that users could have access to the word processing software. This problem persists with Vivaldi, which is based on Google’s own open-source Chromium project.