Google, Yahoo!, Apple Targeted In DoJ Antitrust Probe

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from the Washington Post: "The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether some of the nation's largest technology companies violated antitrust laws by negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another's employees, according to two sources with knowledge of the review. The review, which is said to be in its preliminary stages, is focused on Google; its competitor Yahoo; Apple; and the biotech firm Genentech, among others, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The sources said the review includes other tech companies and is 'industry-wide.' By agreeing not to hire away top talent, the companies could be stifling competition and trying to maintain their market power unfairly, antitrust experts said. ... Obama's antitrust chief at the Justice Department, Christine Varney, has said she plans to look at the network effects of high-tech companies and how their grasp on markets has cut out competitors and hurt consumers."

Comments

Re:antitrust, et al.

[haystor]

If I'm employed by Google and seeking a job at Apple, that agreement is interfering with my negotiations.

If this is true, they are conducting discussions about employment with each other without the affected parties being represented.

If it were two companies conspiring against a third company instead of a just a group of anonymous potential employees, the lawsuits would be measured in the billions.

Re:antitrust, et al.

[brian0918]

Way to confound economic power with political power. Corruption, violation of rights and contracts, none of that is possible without a hand in politics, ie, a politician willing to pass/enforce laws that harm others and violate their rights.

I agree, but they're somewhat better, for now

[Trepidity]

Google has two main differences, I think, for now:

1. They're still largely controlled by some fairly idealistic folks, who are now so filthy rich that they aren't that worried about making even more money, so much as using their multi-billion-dollar playground to incubate things they think of as cool. As long as their playground continues making significant profit margins, the third-party investors will probably let them do this.

2. In many of their market segments, their self-interest isn't as badly aligned with openness as it is for some large companies. With Google's resources, they can afford to make open protocols, avoid a walled-garden approach and allow people to move their data in/out, etc., because they're banking on the competitive advantage of, "go ahead, just try to duplicate this... here, we'll even give you the code and the APIs, now good luck coming up with and setting up / maintaining that much computing power for a lower price than it costs us". This is actually a positive marketing tool in some areas, because a few large companies have gotten burned with data locked into proprietary formats from now-defunct companies, so "we can get our data back out of this thing, right?" is something even companies that don't care about open source are asking these days.

I agree with you that it's quite possible these will change. If its profit margins start going down, investors will start demanding more "normal corporation" type of stuff to try to prop them up, and the founders and their lieutenants will no longer have complete freedom to do what they'd like. If people seem like they are starting to move off some of the services, Google will come under investor pressure to try to lock them in, or at least to no longer be so nice about helping customers avoid lock-in.