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USDOJ Sniffing Google Antitrust Suit, Hires Ex-Disney Lawyer
Van Cutter Romney was one of several to write with the story that "The Justice department has secretly hired former Walt Disney lawyer Sanford Litvack for a possible antitrust suit against Google. As reported earlier, the Justice Department is investigating the deal between Google and Yahoo which accounts for 80% of online search advertising. The Wall Street Journal writes today that Justice Department lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing document subpoenas for weeks — but that doesn't necessarily mean a case will be brought."
1) Google proposes deal with Yahoo.
2) Federal Trade Commission, the government entity charged with regulating business activities vis a vis anti-trust regulations, gives the OK.
3) Google goes through with deal
4) Justice department investigates for anti-trust violations.
Why does this remind me of when the Big Three were getting sued for the type of airbags that the Feds REQUIRED they install, and not having switches to turn them off which they were prohibited from installing by the same regulations?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Could it be that other are having trouble competing with Google because everyone else has lost touch with their user base but google? The only reason I use google search is because how fast it loads, their main page isnt bogged down with crap that takes time to load, it just loads. If one of the big three had been smart enough to know that the hard core among us just want efficiency and we are the ones that provide word of mouth then they would be a lot better of. Google doesn't prevent competition, it just does things better then the competition.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
FTFA:
Yes, and we all know how much that decade-old antitrust suit changed the world...
I get the part that Google is monopolizing the online advertising space. But that is no reason to sue them. It's true that they set a high bar for entry into the market and they will continue to do so as long as customers flock to them.
The only reason for an antitrust suit would be when the company stifles innovation. But if it does customers will automatically move away from them and move to others who have better services. That's simple economics. DOJ doesn't help the process in any way by suing Google.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
This was inevitable. Eventually, Google was going to take some steps forward in some area, and somebody was going to panic that it was a "monopolistic" move. Any sufficiently huge company has to deal with that (even Disney had that problem years ago). It will be interesting how it plays out, however. Antitrust suits usually hinge on making sure that the customer is not ripped off. In this case, the customer is not the end-user who surfs the web. The customer is actually the advertiser, since that is where these guys make their money. And the advertisers can still advertise on both Google and Yahoo equally and increase visitor coverage, so it will be hard to prove that the customer has suffered damages.
How about they fix the M$ problem first? How many companies were destroyed before Linux got a foothold back in the late 90's?
Although one could argue that releasing products for free was akin to underselling the competition, driving other companies out of business by funding these products with alternate revenue streams. Not my opinion, but I can see where they are coming from.
I'm also getting the feeling that this is nothing more than a probe. I guess time will tell on that one.
Google are virtually omnipresent because they are just that good. Nothing and nobody is stopping you or anyone else from trying to compete with them, as seemingly impossible a task as that may be. They don't own a patent on the search engine.
Unlike a certain large OS vendor whose business model revolves around finding new ways to lock customers in, turn open standards into proprietary, patented and licensed rip-offs, and threatening others with lawsuits whenever it feels the need. 235 patents, wasn't it?
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Yea, Google has a stranglehold on Internet search and therefore is in touch with their user base.
MS on the other hand has a stranglehold on the desktop OS and therefore is an evil monopoly.
Let's face it folks here's the only difference:
* Google's monopoly will hurt businesses wanting to buy web ads.
* Microsoft's monopoly will hurt individuals who use desktop products.
It just depends on whether you are a business or an individual as to which monopoly you'll feel stung by.
I think you might be a little confused. The AT&T today is one of the pieces that broke off. However, it is also the piece that owns all the other pieces, except Verizon.
To summarize: DOJ breaks AT&T up, FTC let's them get back together.
In this case, the FTC let's Google and Yahoo get together, now the DOJ is considering breaking them up.
Google became the dominant search engine for a couple of reasons - not only is it really fast and uncluttered, compared to some of its early competitors (remember Hotbot?), but PageRank did a good job of guessing what pages would be the most relevant and most interesting and displaying them first, and nobody's really caught up with them. On the other hand, they've still only got a bit more than 50% of the market - their two main competitors are staying in business.
In advertising, which is how Google makes most of their money, Google ads are uncluttered and fast, so they're not as annoying as other ads, making web site authors more willing to carry them, and apparently advertisers think Google does a good enough job of targeting ads to readers that they're more effective than their competitors or have a better price per result or something.
And unlike Microsoft, where the tight integration between the OS, device drivers, the mail system, the calendar, and Office makes it difficult to leave once you're addicted, it's easy for anybody to use another search engine instead of Google, or for an advertiser to use a different ad agency, and the reason Google stays on top is because they invest enough development money to keep their quality high.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It is NO co-incidence that Microsoft is one of hte top corporate donors to the Republican party. They scratch each others backs regularly.
I am absolutely not a fan of MS, but you must know something that others do not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Because IE never locked its customers out of competitors' sites. Which is why all the legal wrangling over IE bundling was a big waste of time.
For being someone else in this thread to spot the difference between popularity and monopoly.
Ta muchly.
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This isn't baseless or in any way shape or form non-obvious, I've been expecting this to happen for months. It's a matter of history repeating itself. The same thing happened to MS at approximately this point in it's history. Google has enough power via information and access to information that it was only a matter of time before there was an investigation.
I wish I could have given you a +5 tinfoil hat, but seriously, the DoJ is supposed to look into these things. The DoJ happens to not have jurisdiction in either Iraq or North Korea. And not even Iran is under the jurisdiction of the US DoJ.
MS wasn't completely ignored, sure they weren't taken to task as much as they ought to have been, but they weren't just let off the hook. More likely than not Google will end up with a similar arrangement after all is said and done.
Surely there is a difference here in that Google's so called Monopoly is borne of natural migration. People use Google because its better than the other options. Yahoo had its opportunity in the 90s and even at the beginning of this decade and did nothing. They could even have *bought* PageRank when Page and Brin first made the sales pitch to them.
Microsoft is no different in that regard. If it hadn't been too busy looking at AOL and CompuServe and trying to reproduce it with the original MSN, the could have gotten a head start. Instead they're at least half a decade behind everyone else and only making ground by tying their online products into their offline products (Look at MS Office 2007 running on Vista for an example.)
Google created a better product and captured the market share naturally. There is absolutely no impediment to people switching from Google to Yahoo's Overture (or whatever they call it now) or MS AdCenter. In fact, Google make it damn easy for you to get your information out of any of their products to take it to another company. From GMail (and Google Apps) all the way through to their AdWords platforms.
While the DOJ may have an obligation to investigate a monopoly, they cannot rightly charge Google with any anti-trust violations given it does not impede people leaving and the marketshare it has was generated simply by having a better product. They have not in any way used that dominance to force people to only use their product at the expense of others.
Remember BeOS vs Windows 98?
If anything comes of these investigations, it will be a very dark day for the so-called Justice system in the US.