Slashdot Mirror
Google, FTC Settle Antitrust Case
itwbennett writes "According to an ITworld report, 'Google has agreed to change some of its business practices, including allowing competitors access to some standardized technologies, to resolve a U.S. Federal Trade Commission antitrust complaint against the company.' This includes 'allow[ing] competitors access to standards-essential patents the company acquired along with its purchase of Motorola Mobility.' Also among the business practices Google has agreed to stop is 'scraping Web content from rivals and allegedly passing it off as its own, said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz.'" SlashCloud has some more details, including links to the agreement itself and Google's soft-pedaling description of "voluntary product changes."
So, would there be a problem if Google scraped Web content from rivals and proudly proclaimed it was passing it off as its own?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
You think Google lost here? The FTC has been trying for half a decade to bring an anti-trust case against Google, and at the end of it Google has agreed (not even been ordered) to change a few business practices. Google won. And quite frankly, the fact that this is the best the FTC could do against them would indicate that the FTC simply didn't have a case.
This is "settle" in the layman's terms as opposed to legal terms. Technically, the case against Google hadn't even been brought yet. The FTC is walking away because they know they don't have a case because, quite fankly, a lot of the complaints were ridiculous. Oh, youtube is the first result? What a freaking surprise, it's the largest video site on the net by an order of magnitude. Not to mention that Google services often aren't the top result in searches for those services. There are legitimate issues with some of their API's and some of their ad selling, but nothing that comes close to warranting the kind of expenses that a federal anti-trust case would generate (both for Google and the FTC).
Scraped content is against Google' s own webmaster guidelines, where were they passing it off as their own?
All Google agreed was that the patents it holds which are essential to the implementation of certain mobile-telephony standards will be licensed under FRAND terms. They didn't agree to let them be used for free or anything.
Why weren't those already the terms? Standards bodies are supposed to, if they're doing their job, approve standards with some kind of FRAND licensing condition, in order for the standards to actually function as standards. The point of a standard is that everyone making a device with a certain kind of functionality is supposed to conform to certain agreed ("standard") behavior. To do that, they have to be able to legally able to implement the standard, which means any patents essential to the implementation need to be generally available to any third party for licensing, on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Agreed...this is a win for google: U.S. antitrust regulators added that they have found no evidence to claims that Google unfairly favors its own services in search results.
You mean how Google is required by law to comply when ordered by a judge or that Google is one of the few corps that actively try to not only notify the end user that the government is requesting data on them, but Google has actually used its own time and money to fight judges who attempted to seal requests, keeping Google from notifying the end user of such requests.
Yeah, bad bad Google. Not to say they're flawless, but they're not conspiring.
My Grammar teacher would have killed me for that run-on.
Wrong gambit.
MS/Apple/Oracle/Rockstar/Fairsearch's gambit just failed with this settlement.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130103/10491421570/as-expected-ftc-announces-close-google-investigation-with-no-antitrust-charges-minor-tweaks-to-biz-practices.shtml
Google unfairly ranking their own products higher on their search engines would be an abuse of monopoly power. It's not as damaging as a state-run newspaper praising the government, but it has a lot of the same effects.
"regarding the specific allegations that the company biased its search results to hurt competition, the evidence collected to date did not justify legal action by the Commission .. The evidence did not demonstrate that Google's actions in this area stifled competition in violation of U.S. law".
AccountKiller
It might have been, if they did that, but the FTC investigated that claim and didn't find support for it, saying:
Google is required by the Consent Order to make a very specific offer regarding FRAND licensing (to the point that the order includes fill-in-the-blank demand letters Google is to use) before seeking injunctive relief; the FTC sees this as a correction to Google/MMI's past approach in these cases where, in the FTC's view, Google/MMI didn't do as much as it should have regarding seeking a FRAND licensing commitment before seeking injunctive relief.
Its not really a big loss for Google, since Google would be quite happy for other parties to have the option of making the commitment that the letter offers instead of going through an injunction process (which allows Google to demand reciprocal licensing as part of the offer), and even moreso Google would be quite happy with the FTC's stated intent that the proposed approach would become a general model for handling of disputes centered on the use of standards-essential patents.
I don't think that's really all that true; if the FTC was trying to bring a case, it wouldn't agree to a Consent Order, and it would just bring a case.
Certain Google competitors have been pressing the FTC to bring a case, mostly about "search bias", and secondarily and more recently about use of standards-essential patents. The FTC, after investigating, has decided -- unanimously -- to drop the "search bias" issue, and -- narrowly, on a 3-2 vote -- to impose fairly limited restrictions in a Consent Order relating to the use of standards-essential patents, basically saying that Google has to give the other party a clear opportunity to commit to accepting a court determination of FRAND terms, where Google may include a requirement for reciprocal licensing, before it seeks an injunction.
This isn't a loss for the FTC or Google, but it may be a loss for the Google competitors that have been pushing for antitrust action.