Google Antitrust Suit May Go Forward

TechForensics writes "KinderStart, whose page hits and AdSense revenue dropped sharply after changes by Google demoted its appearance in search results, brought suit claiming the search engine effectively suppressed its first amendment rights by lowering the site's visibility. While the Court rejected that argument out-of-hand, it appeared more amenable to KinderStart's argument that since it was a search page, Google's suppression of a rival search engine is prohibited by antitrust laws. The suit may go forward with the judge's commentary."

Comments

I suppose that the outcome

[ScrewMaster]

might be dependent upon whether or not Google treated this outfit any differently than the hundreds of millions of other sites out there. If Google changed the rules but applied them to everyone, this is just a case of sour grapes. If Google deliberately shafted what I'm loosely terming "competition" I suppose it would be different, but it sounds like KinderStart just wants to get their rankings back to where they would like them to be and want the court to force Google to do it. I dunno ... like somebody else mentioned the last time this story appeared on Slashdot, if your business model is entirely dependent upon Pagerank then you're putting all your eggs into one very capricious basket.

Antitrust, antischmust

[Dachannien]

While the Court rejected that argument out-of-hand, it appeared more amenable to KinderStart's argument that since it was a search page, Google's suppression of a rival search engine is prohibited by antitrust laws.

What's next, forcing Wendy's and Burger King to put McDonald's advertising placards in their restaurants?

Re:Uh.

[DavidTC]

What sort of search engine relies on someone searching for it on Google? Am I missing something? Do people go to google, search for 'search engine', find one, and use that to search?

Web directory

[truthsearch]

It looks like KinderStart's primary content is a web directory. That's all that Google would spider. Web directories generally rank very poorly on Google. Google's indexing is written to take into account that when a person is searching for something they generally don't want to be sent to a directory. People want to go directly to the info they're really searching for. And if other highly ranked sights are taking about KinderStart then they'll rank higher in Google's search results for the name. So I don't see this as Google doing anything wrong.

Bout time!

[ShyGuy91284]

I'm sick of typing in "yahoo" and "MSN" and not seeing the search portals. It's such a terrible anti-competition practice. *tries it* Oh, wait. They are the first results. In that case, Google must consider this niche search engine to be a bigger threat then MSN and Yahoo!. Who would have thought? And on a side note, KinderStart now comes up as #4 in an article pertaining to the lawsuit.

Google's Shelf Space = Safeway's Shelf Space

[reporter]

In the market for food, Safeway provides shelf space to food producers: Kraft, Coca-Cola, etc. Without shelf space at a major supermarket, a food producer could, theoretically, sell food but would face insurmountable problems in growing sales. If a customer at Safeway did know whether a particular brand of food exists, then there is no way for her to buy the brand. For all practical purposes, the food producer cannot sell its product even though, in theory, the producer is free to sell. "Forbes" provides a good analysis of the shelf-space issue and the anti-trust implications.

In the market for online products and services, Google provides shelf space by returning links to the sellers (of such products and services) in the Google web page of search results. The analogy between shelf space at Google and shelf space at Safeway is quite strong, and anti-trust laws apply in both cases.

How does Kinderstart fit into this picture? Well, first, consider the case of shelf space at Safeway. Kroger is a direct competitor of Safeway. Both Safeway and Kroger produce their own in-house-branded versions of many foods. For example, Kroger sells Kroger-branded frozen vegetables, and Safeway also sells Safeway-branded frozen vegetables. Should Safeway be expected to give shelf space to Kroger-branded frozen vegetables? Can Kroger's president claim anti-trust violations if Safeway refuses shelf space to Kroger. The answer is "no". Kroger and Safeway are direct competitors, and Safeway cannot be expected to help a direct competitor.

As for Kinderstart, it is a direct competitor of Google. Google is a general search engine that handles all searches in the known universe. Kinderstart deals with only a subset (of that universe): search results dealing with only parenting. Since Google and Kinderstart are direct competitors, we cannot expect Google to help a direct competitor. Google's management is well within its right to even remove Kinderstart from all of Google's search results (i.e. Google's shelf space).

By the way, Google now owns more than 60% of the market for search queries, and Google's marketshare is growing. Google has now entered monopoly territory, and we must keep a watchful eye over Google. Google is fully capable of evil (like catering to Beijing in censoring search results). However, in this particular case involving Kinderstart, Google has not done any evil -- yet.