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FTC's Internal Memo On Google Teaches Companies a Terrible Lesson

schwit1 writes FTC staffers spent enormous time pouring through Google's business practices and documents as well as interviewing executives and rivals. They came to the conclusion that Google was acting in anti-competitive ways, such as restricting advertisers from working with rival search engines. But commissioners balked at the prospect of a lengthy and protracted legal fight. For a big company, that process may have been enlightening. Agency staffers might find evidence of anti-competitive behavior. But that doesn't mean the firm will face the music in the end. Previous attempts to go after big companies — such as the Justice Department's long-running antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s — loomed large in regulators' minds at the time of the Google probe, according to a former official who worked at the agency then. "Even if we were in the right and could win," said the former official, "it could take a lot of resources away from other enforcement."

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  1. Re:Too Big to Nail by gstoddart · · Score: 1, Troll

    No, it's a problem with governments, being beholden to corporations, trying to force corporations to stop being regulated, but doing it in a ham handed way which can't work.

    So every idiot who keeps telling us how awesome the free market will be once they force it on all of us is trying to make sure governments have no power over corporations, and undermining their ability to do anything.

    Unfortunately the people who believe that, once forced upon us, the free markets will bring us the bright shining future ... well, they have no more facts and certainty of the outcomes than Stalin did.

    I see the forcing of your ideology on the world as being little different when it's sociopathic capitalists, or sociopathic communists.

    It's some clown willing to let the world burn to bring about their ideological purity. In its pure form, capitalism and communism are both inherently dangerous ideologies, believed dogmatically by people, and which rest on assumptions which CANNOT be true for the simple fact they they ignore human nature and reality.

    A free market is a lie. Communism is a lie. Killing government so we can live in some fucking Libertarian fantasy is a fucking lie.

    The world full of clowns who are so damned convinced they hold Holy Fucking Truth, and are willing to force the rest of us to play along.

    Those people should be fucking shot.

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    Lost at C:>. Found at C.