Slashdot Mirror
What an Anti-Google Antitrust Case By the FTC May Look Like
hessian writes "It's not certain that Google will face a federal antitrust lawsuit by year's end. But if that happens, it seems likely to follow an outline sketched by Thomas Barnett, a Washington, D.C., lawyer on the payroll of Google's competitors. Barnett laid out his arguments during a presentation here last night: Google is unfairly prioritizing its own services such as flight search over those offered by rivals such as Expedia, and it's unfairly incorporating reviews from Yelp without asking for permission. 'They systematically reinforce their dominance in search and search advertising,' Barnett said during a debate on search engines and antitrust organized by the Federalist Society. 'Google's case ought to have been brought a year or two ago.'"
Why *wouldn't* they prioritize their services and the services of their partners? It's NOT a public service agency, it's a private business, of which there are several significant competitors.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Are they guilty of anti-trust issues if the algorithms put their results first, not due to manipulation, but due to popularity?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Only after starting Internet Explorer then... wait, I already have a web browser? Why would I want to download another one?
Your laziness != anti-trust behavior on the part of Microsoft. Now, if Windows somehow tried to prevent you from downloading/installing an alternate browser, I would understand, but that's just not the case.
Not to mention, if Windows didn't come with any browser whatsoever - how would you go about downloading a new one?
This is pretty much how IE6 became the behemoth that it is. IE has an unbreakable advantage over every other browser: it's owned by the vendor whose OS is a monopoly in its market. That's why.
Does OSX come, by default, with any alternate to Safari? No? Then why is MS treated like some kind of James Bond villain, but Apple isn't?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Thomas Barnett is the "Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust" and also a former lawyer for Microsoft.
Thomas is pushing for antitrust legislation against Google, right now. Thomas has previously Thom rejected Google's claims against Microsoft.
Looks a little suspecious to me.
So wait, which is it? Google is unfairly prioritizing their own services, or unfairly indexing others? Yelp is their competitor. They have their own competing service in Google Places.
You can't have it both ways. You can't say on the one hand that they're "stealing" when they index other people's content and you can't argue that they're being anti-competitive if they don't have enough of other people's content, or other people's content not highly enough ranked. And, bottom line, Google has flatly denied that they do this. They have been explicit in stating that they do not tinker with their algorithm to make their services show up higher than others--so unless you have some evidence they're lying, then what's your case going to be?
No. I disagree. The landscape for the internet was damaged horribly by Microsoft's defacto dominance and their tying the browser with the operating system. In fact, Microsoft has even managed to harm MS Windows by taking this route. (By tying the browser to the OS, they have made having multiple versions of MSIE impossible as far as I can tell.. please link me to proof if I am wrong.) And by tying the browser to the OS, a vulnerability in the browser is a vulnerability in the OS and everything hosted by and accessible to the OS. Additionally, they used their OS dominance to affect other markets via their browser and its Microsoft-only compliance. It threatened the very framework of the web at large.
As a result of all the suits against Microsoft, the landscape has changed to favor a standards compliant direction. This is a huge improvement which would never have happened unless Microsoft was discouraged from their intended path.
I don't have an opinion about Google's tactics as to whether or not they are unfair. Users have never been locked into Google. Users choose which search engine they want to use. Bing is the default for "most default desktops" out there anyway. Google doesn't force users to decide which search engine they will use or lock them into anything. Their level of lock-in with Android is a little disturbing but even that's quite a bit of a choice... I could go without access to the Play store... there are alternatives but I can't imagine trusting any of them just yet. Or I could simply go without using any of those services at all.
I don't think what Google does even compares with what Microsoft has done. Google has created a very popular service. I see it as rather similar to TV channels. We all know, for example, that the news on Fox is slanted in a particular way and favors particular parties over others. If Google should be sued for not being 100% neutral, then perhaps Fox should be sued under the same requirements.
It's funny how quickly people forget history. It wasn't just that they bundled a browser; it went something like this:
- Netscape creates what becomes the standard internet browser and publicly states that they believe it will make the desktop OS irrelevant. MS is afraid of this. Netscape was freely downloadable, but they nagged you to pay them $25 or so to license it.
- MS creates IE, and charges for it, but no one buys it because it sucked.
- MS, still wanting browser market share, starts giving away IE for free. People continue to use Netscape.
- MS bundles IE with Windows and forbids OEMs from adding an alternative browser. Some people switch to IE because it saves them the download step.
- MS creates Front Page, a WYSIWYG HTML editor which was bundled with Office, the already dominant office suite.
- MS creates IIS and ASP, technologies which only worked on Windows.
- With Java applets gaining popularity, MS makes applets created with Visual Studio only runnable on Windows.
- MS starts adding features to Front Page which make the generated HTML non standards-compliant, only viewable by IE and only servable by IIS.
- MS add features to Word to allow it to export to HTML which could only be viewed in IE.
- MS adds ActiveX control integration, making IE the only browser which supports it.
- MS muscles ISPs like Earthlink to place ActiveX controls on their main web pages so that they are only viewable by Windows machines running IE.
- People start switching to IE because Netscape doesn't render Front Page pages properly, so they think IE is a better browser.
- Netscape can't make any money and folds, opening the source to their browser, blaming MS's antitrust behavior for their demise.
- Netscape source code is picked up by the community, but can't support things like ActiveX due to wanting cross-platform feature parity.
- With Netscape dead and IE5/6 being used by nearly every web surfer on the planet, MS stops development on it, hindering web innovation.
As you can see, MS did a very good job of making sure that the web was only viewable by machines running IE on Windows and servable only by NT machines running IIS. That is what the antitrust suit was about, browser integration was just one key point in the whole mess.
That was just the browser side of things, they were also found guilty of using private, unpublished Windows APIs in Office so that it was impossible for a 3rd party software developer to compete at the same level as MS. This was why the original ruling was to split MS into an OS company and a software company.
Read http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for full details.