Dominant Search Engines: An Essential Cultural & Political Facility

When American lawyers talk about essential facilities, they are usually referring to antitrust doctrine that has required certain platforms to provide access on fair and nondiscriminatory terms to all comers. Some have recently characterized Google as an essential facility. Antitrust law may shape the search engine industry in positive ways. However, scholars and activists must move beyond the crabbed vocabulary of competition policy to develop a richer normative critique of search engine dominance. In this chapter, I sketch a new concept of essential cultural and political facility, which can help policymakers recognize and address situations where a bottleneck has become important enough that special scrutiny is warranted. This scrutiny may not always culminate in regulation. However, it clearly suggests a need for publicly funded alternatives to the concentrated conduits and content providers colonizing the web

Alter ego, state of the art on user profiling: an overview of the most relevant organisational and behavioural aspects regarding User Profiling.

This report gives an overview of the most relevant organisational and\ud behavioural aspects regarding user profiling. It discusses not only the\ud most important aims of user profiling from both an organisation’s as\ud well as a user’s perspective, it will also discuss organisational motives\ud and barriers for user profiling and the most important conditions for\ud the success of user profiling. Finally recommendations are made and\ud suggestions for further research are given

Manifold-Marketing:a new marketing archetype for the information age, applied to the adoption of oral contraceptives and other drugs by end-users

Taking into account the new communication paradigm of Social Media this paper proposes an original marketing archetype for the information age named by the authors as “ManifoldMarketing”. The conducted study explores the contribution of participating in social networks on the Internet for the adoption process of oral contraceptives (OCs) and other drugs by their end users. Empirical data for this research was collected from a sample of 1162 respondents of a target population formed by Portuguese women, current or potential users of OCs who had reached a level of college education. The results obtained after applying a package of statistical techniques involving descriptive statistics, nonparametric tests and multivariate analysis show that the use of the Internet as well as the participation in the social network Facebook can contribute to the adoption process of OCs. Market segments which are relevant to pharmaceutical marketing were identified based on criteria that associate the information and communication technologies (ICT) with the adoption process of OCs carried out by the consumers themselves. This study also demonstrates that the adoption model and segmentation proposed can be generalized to other markets in the health sector. Considering the obtained results and the proposed "Manifold Marketing", innovative pharmaceutical marketing guidelines are presented.N/