FTC Now Likely To Admit That Google Does Not, In Fact, Violate Antitrust
from the could-have-done-that-early-on-and-saved-a-lot-of-effort dept
A few months ago, there were rumors that the FTC was ready to go after Google with antitrust charges, though we couldn't figure out how this made sense. At first the story was that it was abusing its search position, but there was little evidence to support it. Then there was talk of using its new ownership of Motorola to go after Google for abusing standards essential patents. But... that seemed like a really tangential way to attack Google. And, as more and more details came out, it increasingly looked like this was an effort by the FTC's chair, Jon Liebowitz, to cement a legacy. Along those lines, there were rumors that Google wasn't willing to just cave to demands for a settlement. The latest is that the FTC is likely to come out next week and say that there's no evidence that Google violated antitrust rules with favoring its own sites in search. The Justice Department could conceivably still go after Google, but it's unclear if there's real appetite there. As the report notes, Europe may be a different story. As we saw with the Microsoft antitrust effort, Europe defines "monopoly power" over markets much more loosely than the US does -- and often seems to use antitrust enforcement to punish successful US companies, rather than look at whether there's actual consumer harm. So, in that venue, it wouldn't be surprising to see Google pressured into a settlement of some sort.![Hide This Hide this](https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/topclose.png)
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Filed Under: antitrust, ftc, jon liebowitz, search
Companies: google
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Also, for those who don't know, Google's web crawler searches on referential terms. This means that the links to a single sight that get referred to the most end up at the top of the list.
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FTFY
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Also, as I've stated before, Google's search is a referential and usually basis relevancy on how many other website refer to a single page. Given that you can Google something in reference to a web search on any search engine....it's just widely used.
Bing, I actually don't like...too flashy and not as clean interface as Google's search engine.
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Immediate consumer harm vs systemic risk
There's a lot of risk to be found in outsourcing key parts of your infrastructure to a foreign corporation. The unfortunate part is most of this isn't addressed in the law, so other laws (like anti-trust) get twisted to suit :P
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Re: Immediate consumer harm vs systemic risk
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Yeah, because we've never criticized Google for anything...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120812/23494420001/seven-reasons-why-google-is-mak ing-mistake-filtering-searches-based-dmca-notices.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120923/2 2351120487/googles-copyright-crackdown-punishes-author-torrenting-his-own-book.shtml
http://www.tec hdirt.com/articles/20120217/00515617789/eff-condemns-google-circumventing-safari-privacy-protections .shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120301/10313817930/google-asking-trouble-with-its-new-pri vacy-policy-eu-official-questions-legality.shtml
Ooops.
And that was less than 5 seconds of searching.
Your being full of shit is showing.
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I figure it's either for attention or that their bias was bruised beyond belief.
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Microsoft hates Google. Especially now that Google is taking over mobile while Windows can't even get its foot in the door. Redmond and its proxies have been waging a mud-slinging campaign against Google (and Android) for some time now, and complaining to the FTC about Google has been part of that.
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It's about choice, not being the first result...
The problem is when you list results, a list, by definition, will contain a first result. Otherwise it wouldn't be a very useful list... You would have to code the page to just throw words and links at the searcher... it wouldn't be a very popular search engine.
And this is where the fight is. To be top of the search results. Somehow, competing vertical search engines feel that it is their privileged entitlement to be top of the list of results. They also think that Google's own algorithm should be weighted towards their own site, despite the fact the algorithm is the core of Google's search and not a democratic voting process or a contract.
It's like saying Microsoft shouldn't just offer alternative browsers, it should cripple it's own browser and run Firefox when you click on the IE icon.
Finally it does come down to convenience and effect on the user. IE was not an easy thing to disable or uninstall, it was made a core part of the OS. Google search on the other hand can be "uninstalled" as fast as it can take you to type in another URL. You are free to click on an advertisement, the Google service, the top result or a result further down the page on Google's "platform".
I'd much more prefer to see the FTC take on Microsoft on the bundling of its OS with hardware, it's skulduggery over secure boot and it's patent trolling over Linux.
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Re: It's about choice, not being the first result...
They're almost there. All they are missing is bundling Firefox with Windows and change the shortcuts.
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