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Comment by titzer

5 days ago

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.