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Obama Anti-Trust Chief on Google the Monopoly Threat
CWmike writes "The blogosphere regularly excoriates Microsoft for being a monopoly, but Google may be in the cross-hairs of the nation's next anti-trust chief for monopolistic behavior, writes Preston Gralla. Last June, Christine A. Varney, President Obama's nominee to be the next antitrust chief, warned that Google already had a monopoly in online advertising. 'For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,' Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute, according to a Bloomberg report. The US economy will 'continually see a problem — potentially with Google' because it already 'has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.' Varney has yet to be confirmed as antitrust chief, and she said all this before she was nominated. Still, it spells potentially bad news for Google. It may be time for the company to start adding to its legal staff."
Correct. A monopoly position is not illegal. Using it to punish competitors or as a means of compliance is.
Google should be watched for abuse of their monopoly power in advertising, but so far I don't think there is any existing evidence to show abuse.
We have yet another person obtaining a position of power after displaying evidence of prior bias, but that's just how politics work. Fortunately, Google has the resources to vigorously defend themselves against spurious charges of monopoly abuse. Unfortunately, Google has the resources to vigorously defend themselves against non-spurious charges of monopoly abuse.
If they are looking for a company that hods a monopoly in advertising, they should look somewhere else
I've never liked Microsoft, but I've never liked the antitrust claims against them either. Google's actions are awesome, and Microsoft's are evil, and I'm not sure why. I certainly hope there's more to it than the popularity contest.
One company leveraged their dominant product directly to push a secondary product that might otherwise have been supplanted in favor of a rival. The other created a product so superior to everything on an already saturated market that they outstipped the competition on sheer technical prowess alone. One company put something free into a product that everyone had to pay for to coexist technologically. The other put their money-making product into a free offering that was among a huge field of other free offerings. Microsoft can subsidize products with their massive revenues, but for them to gain the traction that they do requires that they be incorporated into the one product that many people have to have: their operating system. Google can subsidize their products with their massive advertising revenue, but can't actually tie their products to the purchase of ad space. They still have to rely on technical superiority for adoption. If nobody has a reason to use it (i.e. Chrome), they don't have a customer base that they can foist it off on by unnecessarily tying it to a product many people need. That their advertising revenues benefit from ad placement in their free products attests to the popularity of the product rather than to the tying between it and the advertising. Gmail is a delivery channel for advertising, but had to be compelling in some way to encourage users to voluntarily sign up for the advertising channel over Yahoo! Mail or MS Live (among others in the field).
On first blush, Google and Microsoft can be compared readily. They are dominant in their fields. When you get past that, however, the ways they achieved (and used) their dominance are nearly polar opposites.
I'm not a huge fan of either of them. One is useful but otherwise unremarkable aside from sheer popularity, one is barely tolerated out of necessity. For many people it probably is a knee-jerk popularity contest, but that's to be expected since the vast majority of people have no reason to consider the issue any deeper than what they garner from passing comments and opinions of others.