Since 2009, a number of critical studies of Google have been published. The focus tends to be more on prosumers and on the free labor performed by Google users rather than on the advertising system and the audience commodity. Here I argue that the key to the political economy of Google as a search engine is not the free labor performed by the prosumers, but how the advertising system works. [...]

[...]

Other studies that also discuss the political economy of Google include Kang and McAllister (2011) and Pasquinelli (2009b) [...] suggests that the political economy of Google is the political economy of PageRank. Value accumulation comes from the economies of attetion--which depends on the attention capital of the whole network--and of cognition--which depends on Google being a "rentier" of the Internet. To Caraway (2011), "the media owner rents the use of the medium to the industrial capitalist who is interested in gaining access to an audience" (701). Pasquinelli (2009b) has overlooked that technology only increases productivity, but it does not create surplus value. Fuchs (2012b) has effectively shown that it is erroneous to assume that PageRank produces profits. [...]