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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."
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).
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.
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.