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Google Negotiating With Justice Department
mikesd81 writes "Cnet reports that to avoid being sued by the US Justice Department, Google is negotiating with them. The Justice Department and a multistate task force are still reviewing the proposal to decide whether to oppose the partnership. Under the non-exclusive partnership Google would supply Yahoo with some search ads, a move that could increase Yahoo search revenue, but that also gives Google even more power in the market. Yahoo expects the 10-year deal to raise revenue by $800 million in its first year and to provide an extra $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow. Google's share of the US search market reached 71 percent in August, compared with Yahoo's 18.26, according to Hitwise's most recent numbers."
I'm generally wary of monopoly behaviors, but so far, I see nothing monopolistic here. Now, if Google/Yahoo require advertisers who want to run ads on their sites and ad networks to only run on them and nobody else, that's a monopoly practice. It would be equally monpolistic if Google/Yahoo said to a site that wanted to join their ad network "Sure, but you have to sign this agreement that says only Google/Yahoo-networked ads can run on my site". I don't see any such direct allegations though. What am I missing?
RW
Yes, not doing sleazy stuff to the search results certainly helps them dominate search, but I wonder it it is really Page Rank and their patent on it that is to blame for their dominance.
Maybe indexing the web as well as google without infringing on the page rank patent is impossible.
Maybe it is possible to be almost as good as google, but the fact that google doesn't actively try to drive it's users away means that there is as yet no compelling reason for users to switch from google.
It will be very interesting to see what happens when the pagerank patent expires.
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Just like they sued Microsoft on behalf of Sun "for the good of the people".
The justice department doesn't go out and look for these cases. They only get involved after intense lobbying. And given the Google has a monopoly on search (71% sounds low unless they're including sites that index themselves instead of using an outside service) I would say that the Justice department should be keeping an eye on them.
Not to mention that Google is looking more and more evil despite their cute slogan. They bought DoubleClick. Does anybody think that they did that because they couldn't reporduce DoubleClick's technology? They wanted the DoubleClick databases going back to the early days of the internet. Combine that historical data with all of the data they have about you (almost every search you've ever made, the contents of your mail if you use GMail, the contents of your documents if you use Google Docs, information about your videos if you post them to YouTube, what news you read if you get it from Google News, where you like to go if you use Google Maps, etc.) The information that Google knows about an individual is staggering. It makes the CIA look like a bunch of amateurs.
But then, Slashdot likes Google.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?