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FTC To Recommend Antitrust Case Against Google
NeutronCowboy writes with news that a majority of top staff members from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission have become convinced that Google "illegally used its dominance of the search market to hurt its rivals." The FTC is now drafting a memo that recommends the U.S. government begin an antitrust case against Google.
"The agency’s central focus is whether Google manipulates search results to favor its own products, and makes it harder for competitors and their products to appear prominently on a results page. ... The memo is still being edited and changes could be made, but these are mostly fine-tuning and will not alter the broad conclusions reached after an inquiry that began more than a year ago, said these people, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified. ... The FTC staff memo does not mean that the government will sue Google for antitrust violations. Next, the vote of three of the five FTC commissioners would be required. And each step is a further prod for Google to make concessions to reach a settlement before going to court. Last month, Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC, said a final decision on whether to sue Google would be made before the end of this year.
If you were in the business of advertising...
Wouldnt it be 100% your control AND your business to do exactly this? determine which ads to put where and why to get the best result?
Google is being investigated for doing their job... lol
Nobody forces anyone to use Google to search. They don't sell search. I fail to see a case, but IANAL.
Wrong company jackasses! You should be going after Apple!!!!
You get the government you pay for.
If I go to Google and search for "web browser" the results are:
1. Wikipedia
2. Opera
3. Opera again
4. Mozilla
5. News for web browser
6. Chrome
7. Safari
8. Webopedia (of all things)
9. Maxthon
10. Flock
11. docs.python.org
Those bastards!
It is easy enought to get on the first page. Simply develop a decent page, keep it simple, and you win. Disgusting that FTC is being bought by other businesses which is likely MS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I wouldn't go to the same extremes you do in describing google. I do agree that google's business model is built on exploiting consumer's habit for profit, but the issue with the FTC, is that the other creepy uncles of the world are demanding their chance to go through your things. Getting the FTC involved will only make things worse.
The analogy that I prefer is that of a creepy, too-friendly neighbor who hires a private detective to thoroughly investigate you, so that it knows what kind of housewarming gift to give you.
I'm not sure that Google has plans to go all Big Brother on us (that seems more like an Apple or Microsoft thing). Google strikes me as more like an awkward, autistic person who just doesn't realize how creepy his behavior is. He means well, but he's just to damn creepy for me to be comfortable around him.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Romeo,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Although, I will the first to admit that you're a persistent little cuss.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ri~ght, because the internet is totally closed and there is no price competition there. Also, everyone only buys the things they see in ads.
I have noticed that those who defend government intrusion into both the private lives of citizens and into the market come up with the wildest, most asinine examples to justify their intrusion. When bad things happen as a result of thier intrusion, they then use those to justify more intrusion. There is a disgusting metaphor that is apt here, but I will leave it be. Needless to say, the practice utterly disgusts me.
If Google ever tried that people would just switch to other services. The entry cost is relatively low and Google doesn't really have a monopoly on anything, there are other search engines, email providers, browsers and phones. Competition ensures that they never can pull a stunt like that.
This is a strong claim, I wonder if there's any proof to back it up. I've never noticed a bias towards Google's services in search, the only time I remember is when they displayed a warning on Youtube saying that it only works in Chrome. That was somewhat distasteful but has been removed since, and in fact I used Google to find another email service without much problem. Can someone show search terms that have a bias?
So blame Google for it...
Mod parent up. How does it help business for the government to set the example of: "Oh, if you become too successful, we'll sue the shit out of you. Because it's unfair to your competitors that you did a better job than they did. Unless, of course, you've donated sufficiently to some of our campaigns; then we'll probably leave you alone."
When I type in ANAL, I get your Mom's phone number...
because telling people how to use their mod points is lame.
You forget that he gets shitloads of money from selling information about you to his clients.
Google does not sell user data.
Google uses user data to target advertising, but doesn't really even give advertisers much control over what demographics to hit... instead Google's algorithms learn which demographics tend to favor what kinds of products and does the targeting itself. Google doesn't provide much feedback to advertisers about what those algorithms have decided, and certainly doesn't give them information about particular users.
Actually giving any of the information to clients would reduce its value, after all, and clients wouldn't be nearly as good as Google at applying it effectively anyway.
Translation of this more accurate description into the creepy-neighbor analogy is left as an exercise for the reader.
I thought the legal responsibility of any public corporation was to do any thing ethical and legal to earn money for shareholders. What do the regulators expect them to do ?
Is it just me that suspects that this will turn out as a giant waste of tax payer money?
If I go TO GOOGLE's SEARCH ENGINE to find a service, I don't generally go there expecting that a search for "webmail" is going to find my corporate OWA page...
If someone want's to find Yahoo's offerings, they would search for "yahoo mail"
and if you weren't sure (or didn't care) you'd likely be one of the stupidly large percentage of people that just use the built-in-bing search in IE to "search" for email.
(which to my surprise, returns yahoo, gmail, wikipedia, mail.com, then hotmail)
I think the real COMPLAINT here is that Google doesn't PROMOTE their competition AHEAD of their own products. (which we all know just means "promote their competition for FREE")
Google's own reply to monopoly charges was something like: If people don’t like our search results, they're free to try Bing, Yahoo,etc., or "even Google Minus Google".
Pretty straightforward response and to the point, if you ask me. If you don't trust Google search, try other search engines. Who's stopping you? They're just one click away... and among the first - Google search - results for "search engine":
1. Wikipedia definition of Web search engine
2. Dogpile Web search
3. Bing
4. Yahoo! Search
Interestingly, Google''s own product, its Custom Search Engine, comes only in 7th position...Seems to me if I were to "abuse my position of dominance to hurt rivals", I wouldn't list my results as above.
The DOJ isn't involved yet, so cut the conspiracy bullshit.
Whether a monopoly is illegal isn't decided by how you acquired the monopoly. It's what you do after you achieve monopoly level market share which determines whether your monopoly is legal or illegal. You can be as anticompetitive as you want, but once you dominate any market segment, you have to be careful how you use that dominance.
I agree Google is probably fine, but for different reasons.
I am inclinded to think that Google has is manipulating their search results but opposite from what they are assuming in the article.
Think about it this way: Googles algorithm bumps up the most popular results page rank. If people are using Google Search to find other Google products (very common, seeing as how Google Search is integrated in most browsers by default) then the PageRank for those products will be higher. One way around this (as mentioned above by someone else) is to use what is called "google minus google". Essentially when you search using Hoogle Search you append a "-google" to the end of your query. This will filter out any Google related results.
I moved away from Google a while ago, now using DuckDuckGo. Tried StartPage but it just seemed like they were trying too hard to be google, not taking their own direction.
I'm pretty sure I've seen HBO ads on all the major broadcast networks... If NBC was willing to buy ad space on CBS, I'm pretty sure CBS would allow it. If CBS wanted to charge NBC more for that slot than say ShamWow, there might be a problem.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
When google bought doubleclick then admobi who was left as a major player in the online ads market? Especially since Google has a massive amount of data on you from all your searches, email, documents, and other services you may use from them or others use via them (analytics anyone?).
iAds competes, but only on iOS. Facebook has ads, but it's only on facebook. If I want to do online advertising for a widget or a branding campaign using online ads on a non-specific platform, there's pretty much google.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
That is a naive conclusion. Google's algorithm adjusts search result ranking based on popularity. If google products are popular, should google up the rankings of less popular products? ...
I see lots of microsoft bing ads on youtube and I don't like them. If I switch away from the ads and google's ranking adjusts so it doesn't show me more of them how is that google's bias?
I don't see how you can separate out the user's preference from google's bias without examining the google ranking algorithms. I could see if google's products were worse than their competitors and everyone widely hated them, that it would be odd to see them ranked higher than their competitors. But when the opposite is true, then there is no need for manipulation on google's part.
It seems the governments wants google to produce an inferior ranking system and it is most likely the government is clueless on the technology and is responding to lobbying. My tax dollars hard at work
Do they have a monopoly? No? Then they don't face a monopolies restrictions.
Google has about 2/3 of the search market, while Comcast has about 1/3 of the connectivity market. Now zoom in a little bit and you get a bunch of regions where Comcast has 100% market share, because they are the only provider.
There's nowhere in the world where Google has 100% market share, or where users do not have a choice but to use Google.
.: Semper Absurda
I think this is spot on.
Unlike companies such as Microsoft, Apple or even Facebook, Google is mainly identified with "Googlers," that is their engineers, rather than with the leader of the corporation. Google's engineers add creepy features because they actually think it's great if their friends can all track their locations in real time.
.: Semper Absurda
You're right, but it just shifts the trust problem to data storage.
.: Semper Absurda
Google isn't supposed to use their web site to promote their own products?
Well shit, my own company's website does that too. I thought that was why we had the site in the first place, to be honest. Guess I'm doing it wrong.
-Lod
No one forces you to use Google, unlike Microsoft where every defauly installation of Internet Explorer has BING as the default search engine, and MS embedding msBing into Office applications ..
Bing Bar
AccountKiller
Sounds like typical status quo for this administration: punish those that succeed.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This will be the hardest case the FTC has ever attempted.
In a normal anti-trust case you have a company that has and established product with barriers to entry to the market that typically include:
1. Cost of replacement products (Microsoft is an example of this because the cost of replacement was significant to the cost of the computer).
2. Difficult interoperability (Microsoft again is a good example because the software market made it difficult if not impossible for competitors).
3. Difficult customer access (AT&T is a perfect example of this, building out a last mile telecom network is a huge undertaking, even long distance competitors couldn't access their customers without government intervention).
4. Business collusion and exclusion that prevented competition (almost every FTC case involved this because it's a necessary aspect of enforcement of the sherman-anti trust rules, in the case of MS it was contracts and such that involved the punishing and rewarding of other companies in the business that worked with the competitor).
The FTC might be able to prove that Google is putting their results at the front but they are going to have a hell of time given the facts. No one, not a single soul is forced to use google products. Not only that but the startup costs and difficulty in creating competitive products is nearly non-existent. There are dozens of competing products in almost every single category Google works in and the only reason they haven't been replaced is that they continue to innovate their core products. I really don't think they have case against Google in any of their core markets. Now I do think that what Google did with maps pro (don't jump to conclusions, if you don't know what I'm talking about don't reply) was a dirty evil act right ouf of Microsoft's play-book but I don't think outside that the government even has a case. Everyone could decide to use a different search engine, advertising, maps, calendar, email, phone (android open source doesn't require Google products) tomorrow and there is absolutely nothing stopping people from doing so other than the fact that Google generally offers the better product. With the exception of the maps pro incident Google has none of the barriers to entry that the government hung their hat on during other anti-trust cases.
Personally, I don't think the government will win and I pray Google doesn't just give in.
You don't need 100% market share to wield monopoly power. You don't even need 50% to wield it in some cases.
Does google wield monopoly power in search? Yes. I don't think there is much of an argument there. They probably wield it in other segments too, but those may be less obvious.
It's a little more actively blocked than that:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-blocks-google-chrome-extension-for-exporting-friends/1935
The value that facebook and twitter bring to the advertising table is the network graph of user relationships. They actively block Google from getting this information, and as a result, the information Google has on the network relationships from its Google+ product is better information in terms of better representing the connectivity between people, and therefore social relevance.
If Facebook and Twitter quit blocking the connectivity information, then it's likely the rankings would be Facebook -> Twitter -> Google+, when comparing those networks bulk of data.
The real issue is that they feared people taking the network information, and exporting their information to other networks; be aware that the blocking Facebook does is also effective against Twitter importing network information from Facebook as well.
If the graph data were portable, then graph data hosting would be a commodity, and the user value proposition would exist only in the ability to utilize that graph data on behalf of the user. The advertising is a value proposition for the effective use of graph data by advertisers, not the users about whom the data has been collected.
What this means in reality is that these services generally perceive themselves as having little value beyond their network connectivity graphs, and that they are strongly fighting against the commoditization of the graph data because of this.
Effectively, they are admitting that users get little value from this data from the data hosting provider, that can't just as easily be obtained elsewhere - and probably better at the elsewhere, since as long as the data is proprietary, the hosting company can concentrate on the needs of advertisers rather than users, which is where their revenue base lies.
It is false to claim that an algorithm is neutral because algorithms can be discarded until a favourable algorithm is found.
Assuming there's some evidence that such a selection criterion was used. And I doubt there's *that* much freedom in algorithm selection... remember that the chosen algorithm has to work for all of the rest of the cases in a fashion that's not too sub-optimal.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.