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Google Was 3 Hours Away From DOJ Antitrust Charges
turnkeylinux writes "Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. called off their joint advertising agreement just three hours before the Department of Justice planned to file antitrust charges to block the pact, according to the lawyer who would have been lead counsel for the government. 'We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day,' says Litvack, who rejoins Hogan & Hartson today. 'We told them we were going to file the complaint at that time of day. Three hours before, they told us they were abandoning the agreement.'"
The only downside is it's a waste of tax payers cash, not that most public sector jobs aren't a waste of tax payers cash anyway though.
On the contrary, breaking up formed monopolies is a lot more expensive than preventing monopolies from forming in the first place.
(on a side note: for those who thought Google was any less predatory than Microsoft, think again...)
We could call the game "Antitrust Frogger". You start a merger and jump out of the way just before you get hit by the DOJ. I'm not sure what your reward would be for making it to the other side of the road though...
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
The reward is always the same in these matters...Profit!
The only downside is it's a waste of tax payers cash
That does not appear to be a concern of anyone in Washington these days.
[Insert pithy quote here]
The way I see it, two things could happen:
1. Google and Yahoo could partner, leading to a monopoly.
2. Yahoo will go out of business, leading to a monopoly.
There is no way to prevent a monopoly.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Quite the opposite. The authorities were on the ball, gathered info and told the parties they'd likely be filing a formal complaint. The result: the putative monopoly was broken up almost before it began, with no damage to the marketplace and no long, hugely expensive trial and appeals that would have sucked money and energy from the state and the corporate parties alike. And the way they did it, if Google and Yahoo really thought they would win such a process they were still free to go ahead and face the consequences.
Sounds like the state did a pretty good job in this case.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
These days? Just how new are you to this?
So, let me see if I understand this...
Companies like GM and AIG were allowed to grow to the point where their possible failure threatens the entire national (world?) economy -- no questions from DOJ lawyers.
But Google and Yahoo want to pool their advertising resources, and suddenly the republic is threatened.
Mmm hmmm.
Of course, that is assuming that there is some need to break up a 'monopoly' in the first place.
The sad thing is the proof of the need for antitrust laws has been staring us in the face for months now. Since the bailout of AIG how many times have we heard the phrase, "too big to fail." How many companies are now trying to convince us that they also are too big to fail? In effect these companies are telling us that they represent a single point of failure for the entire US economy.
The leftist view that we need to prop up these companies is completely wrong. The righties' hands-off approach to all things private inevitably leads to wild fluctuations as companies consolidate and dominate government and individual roles followed by epic collapses and rebuilding periods.
Those that worship at the alter of the free market either don't understand: 1. That competition is the heart of capitalism, or 2. Companies hate, and will suppress, competition because it cuts into profits.
The government should play a role in enforcing competition in a healthy market place. Too much government intervention leads to inefficiency and no government intervention leads to corruption. It is through the involvement of an INFORMED electorate that WE THE PEOPLE control how our government interacts with the private sector.
I say use the bailout money to break these companies up into more manageable and competitive pieces that, once established, will be made into private companies again.
Boiling your opinions down to oversimplifications like, "no government intervention ever!" is an excuse to remain uninformed and ignorant of what the problems actually are and will lead us away from any real solutions.
Both parties spend large sums of money on propaganda campaigns through right and left wing media outlets to convince us of the correctness of their oversimplified slogans and misrepresentations of the other side. If you believe them, know that you are being used.
No, what Google and Yahoo were planning to do was to stop competing with each other and from a joint venture. That is specifically prohibited under the anti-trust laws. Obtaining a monopoly through fair competition is legal in the US. Obtaining a monopoly or dominant market position by forming a cartel with competitors is not.
It is very different from what Microsoft was accused of which in turn was rather different from the anti-competitive behavior that they engaged in. David Boies botched the Microsoft anti-trust case from the start. He brought it on the basis of complaints from Sun and Netscape that were really more about providing an alibi for their own incompetence than justified compaints. Netscape's treatment of Spyglass was vastly more aggressive than Microsoft's treatment of Netscape. Sun could have partnered with Microsoft to establish itself as a viable alternative to Intel. Instead they tried to challenge Intel and Microsoft at the same time.
Netscape was giving the browser away so that they could sell a server that exploited exploit the latest essentially proprietary features of their client. By essentially proprietary I mean their habit of releasing a product and submitting the 'standards proposal' to W3C on the same day with no prior discussion whatsoever. That is how cookies were deployed, that is how SSL was deployed and that is how Javascript was deployed. And in every case the Netscape version was initially broken in ways that have taken years to fix afterwards. If you tried to use Javascript in 1995 it was much more likely to crash your browser than do what was intended.
Now if the DoJ had concentrated on the pricing of Windows they had a real argument. The unit pricing scheme was certainly anti-competitive. But giving away the browser with the O/S was not anticompetitive, the browser was originally intended to be free software that shipped with the O/S. tim Berners-Lee proposed the deep integration into the O/S.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/