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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.
Is it just me, or does everything in the US start with secret allegations that are insane, completely disproven before they're even made public, and yet still acted upon fiercly only to suffer humilation in the end?
Be it military, with imminent threats of destruction from a nation that has no way to harm anyone but themselves, yet turning a blind eye to nations that could (Iraq vs. North Korea for example?)... or be it corporate, where anti-trust is thrown around at google, yet there isn't anything substantial while other companies like microsoft are clearly doing it and are ignored.
It's an upsetting pattern to watch unfold.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
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.
Americaaaa!! Fuck Yeah!
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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My first reaction was that this has Microsoft written all over it (being that Yahoo refused to sell itself to them).
Microsoft learned a lesson about the DOJ when it went toe-to-toe with it: it's a tool to be used like any other.
A Mickey Mouse case if ever I heard of one.
Or at least a Goofy one.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
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.
You jest, but this is essentially what happened to Alcoa back in the day - they were hit with an antitrust suit because they kept making aluminum more efficiently than anyone else and lowering their prices.
Note that the similarities end there. There are strategic reasons to not want a single source for a critical material. There are no such strategic reasons relating to Google. That I can think of.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Note that Sanford ("Sandy") Litvack, now 72 years old, was an Assistant Attorney General for the Carter administration, where he headed the DoJ Antitrust Division. His first job after law school was as a trial attorney for the DoJ Antitrust Division in the Eisenhower administration. This will be his second return from private practice to assist the DoJ.
"The Justice department has SECRETLY hired former Walt Disney lawyer Sanford Litvack for a possible antitrust suit against Google"
The original article states that the gov't quietly hired Litvack. The idiot journalist at InfoWorld converted that into "secretly".
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Since when does "providing customer with a good product" equate with a monopoly?
Does that mean that if I am TOO successful in the creation and marketing of my product, I have opened myself up to reprimand/repercussions from the government? Someone help me out here. I simply don't get it.
If I make something far superior to my nearest competitor, and the entire customer base switches to my product, I've done something wrong?
Can someone please explain why this is even an issue for Google?
Is it just me, or does everything in the US start with secret allegations that are insane, completely disproven before they're even made public, and yet still acted upon fiercly only to suffer humilation in the end?
It's just you.
Advice: on VPS providers
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
... just the ABUSE of them. Think of all the niche markets where somebody has a monopoly on it. If there is evidence of Google abusing their "monopoly" in search and advertising to get a stranglehold on other markets, then having the DOJ look into it is a good thing. So they've got 80% of the online advertising market with the deal with Yahoo; good for them. Are they abusing it somehow? Artificially inflating advertising prices? Any examples?
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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Well, last time I read an analysis of the surrealistic attempt by MS to buy Yahoo, it apparently involved a patent actually. Some small company had come up with a ludicrious blanket patent on, basically, AdWords. If you automatically match keywords to serve an ad, congrats you infringe on it. Yahoo bought them. Yahoo apparently licensed it to Google, but refuses to license it to MS for any sum. So basically it's in a position to block anyone it wants to from entering the context-matched ads segment, and does just that.
So before we all go orgasmic about "OMG google is soo smart that they monopolized the context-matched ad space, and MS is so dumb that it can't even do that except in a few asian countries"... well, it's because basically MS is kept from entering that maket at all.
Anyway, that shitload of money offered for buying Yahoo, were apparently all about that patent. And Yang & Co would rather lose money for its shareholders, _and_ hand in the goose that lays golden eggs to Google, than let MS compete there. They practically offered to bow down and give Google their share of that market space, then let MS in at all.
Now I don't have any particular love for MS, nor any particular hatred for Google, but, seriously, isn't this exactly what the anti-trust laws were supposed to prevent? What I see there is a case of #1 and #2 in a market, colluding to keep #3 out of it. And everyone else, for that matter.
_If_ we decided that it's the ultimate evil to artificially raise trade barriers just to keep competitors out, if you're MS... shouldn't the same apply when Yahoo and Google do it? I mean, seriously, what's the difference?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.