Criticism of Google includes concern for tax avoidance, misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy and collaboration with the US military on Google Earth to spy on users,^[1] censorship of search results and content, its cooperation with the Israeli military on Project Nimbus targeting Palestinians^[2] and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, antitrust, patent infringement, indexing and presenting false information and propaganda in search results, and being an "Ideological Echo Chamber".

Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products,^[3] and generates profit primarily from advertising through its Google Ads (formerly AdWords) program.^[4][5]

Google's stated mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful";^[6] this mission, and the means used to accomplish it, have raised concerns among the company's critics. Much of the criticism pertains to issues that have not yet been addressed by cyber law.

Shona Ghosh, a journalist for Business Insider, noted that an increasing digital resistance movement against Google has grown.^[7]

Tax evasion

Google cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the period of 2007 to 2009 using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and The Netherlands to Bermuda. Afterwards, the company started to send £8 billion in profits a year to Bermuda.^[8] Google's income shifting—involving strategies known to lawyers as the "Double Irish" and the "Dutch Sandwich"—helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.^[9][10]

According to economist and member of the PvdA delegation inside the Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats in the European Parliament (S&D) Paul Tang, the EU lost, from 2013 to 2015, a loss estimated to be 3.955 billion euros from Google.^[11] When comparing to other countries outside the EU, the EU is only taxing Google with a rate of 0,36 – 0,82% of their revenue (approx. 25-35% of their EBT) whereas this rate is near 8% in countries outside the EU. Even if a rate of 2 to 5% – as suggested by ECOFIN council – would have been applied during this period (2013–2015), a fraud of this rate from Facebook would have meant a loss from 1.262 to 3.155 billion euros in the EU.^[11]

Google has been accused by a number of countries of avoiding paying tens of billions of dollars of tax through a convoluted scheme of inter-company licensing agreements and transfers to tax havens.^[12][13] For example, Google has used highly contrived and artificial distinctions to avoid paying billions of pounds in corporate tax owed by its UK operations.^[14]

On May 15, 2013, Margaret Hodge, the chair of the United Kingdom Public Accounts Committee, accused Google of being "calculated and unethical" over its use of the scheme.^[14] Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has claimed that this scheme of Google is "capitalism",^[15] and that he was "very proud" of it.^[16]

In November 2012, the UK government announced plans to investigate Google, along with Starbucks and Amazon.com, for possible tax avoidance.^[17] In 2015, the UK Government introduced a new law intended to penalize Google's and other large multinational corporations' artificial tax avoidance.^[18]

On 20 January 2016, Google announced that it would pay £130m in back taxes to settle the investigation.^[19] However, only 8 days later, it was announced that Google could end up paying more, and UK tax officials were under investigation for what has been termed a "sweetheart deal" for Google.^[20]