Comment by tantalor
5 days ago
"Conflict of interest" has a precise ethical/legal definition. It doesn't mean "somebody is doing something I don't like".
5 days ago
"Conflict of interest" has a precise ethical/legal definition. It doesn't mean "somebody is doing something I don't like".
From the Oxford dictionary:
conflict of interest, n:
a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible.
"the conflict of interest between elected officials and corporate lobbyists"
Sure that's a colloquial sense, but we're talking about a legal sense here.
The legal/ethical sense is where one party has an actual obligation to multiple other parties whose interests are incompatible. For instance, a lawyer who represents both sides of a dispute has a conflict in interest; they cannot faithfully satisfy their obligations to all their clients.
In your example you cited a few services,
* provide a search engine
* provide login
* run ads business
* provide a web browser
But you haven't explained what the legal/ethical obligations are, and where the conflict arises, e.g., how one company cannot possibly fulfill all of those obligations.
>but we're talking about a legal sense here.
Yes, because you suddenly brought up the legal definition.