Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google

http://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-of-google-1426793274

by uptown • 11 years ago

103 56 11 years ago

wsj.com

uptown2• 11 years ago

Clickable: https://www.google.com/search?q=Inside+the+U.S.+Antitrust+Pr...

RexRollman• 11 years ago

Thanks.

bruceboughton• 11 years ago

Oh the irony.

uptown2• 11 years ago

Yeah, that crossed my mind when I linked it up.

us0r• 11 years ago

sirseal• 11 years ago

Where's the Antritrust Probe of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and all of those other shit-eating ISPs? At least Google gives me some fantastic services at little cost to me.

adventured• 11 years ago

The US Government already controls Comcast and Time Warner Cable through the regulations in the telecom industry, the FCC, and so on. The Feds, for example, can easily interrupt their merger at any time they see fit. These companies are government regulated monopolies (or at the least near-monopolies), much like AT&T and Verizon.

The problem with Google, as far as the US Government is concerned, is that it is not a government regulated monopoly. They fear anything with such vast scope and influence / power, that they don't have a certain level of direct control over.

The purpose of pursuing Google on anti-trust is to bring them under supervision of the US Government. The same reason the Feds were interested in Microsoft. It surprisingly takes very little to cause anti-trust problems for a major company, as little as one powerful senator dedicated to the issue. Google will be brought under a consent decree in the next few years most likely, and by the time the Feds get around to doing that, the market will have likely already made Google's dominance in search a lot less important.

sdrinf• 11 years ago

| ...by the time the Feds get around to doing that, the market will have likely already made Google's dominance is search a lot less important.

Can you elaborate on how that might happen, operationally?

jacobolus• 11 years ago

There’s no “they” here, the “US Government” isn’t “concerned” about anything, and the Comcast/TWC merger is at the mercy of an enormously complex political process/system, not some singularly acting Feds who can “see fit” to do one thing or another. Anthropomorphizing an institution as big as the US Federal Government is dangerous, because it easily leads to reasoning about institutions as if they were individual people, but such entities behave in entirely different ways than individuals.

Anyway, with that digression out of the way, if you want to understand the relationship between government regulators and telecommunications companies, I highly recommend Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch. Government regulation of telecommunications industries has often been contingent, contradictory, and somewhat chaotic (in the sense that small nudges lead to dramatic unpredictable changes).

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

They fear anything with such vast scope and influence / power, that they don't have a certain level of direct control over.

Their cozy relationships with the big banks could've fooled me.

cbd1984• 11 years ago

Cable and fiber ISPs as they exist now, with the same company owning the wires and providing the service, are inevitably going to be natural monopolies, because of the massive start-up costs of entering the market combined with the trivial (near-zero) costs to the incumbent ISPs to add one more customer.

In that case, new companies have to lay new cables and provision new data centers and hire new people, whereas TWC only has to ship out a cable modem and allow access to pre-existing capacity.

One way around this would be to force TWC and Comcast and so on to divest themselves of the physical infrastructure up to their in-plant demarcation points, spin off new natural monopolies to only own the cables, and force those new companies to lease to all comers at the same low rate, with a managed X% profit spelled out in regulations. That way, an upstart would only have to provision new data centers and hire new people; that's still more than Comcast has to do, but it's a lot less than the current state of affairs.

This is related to Net Neutrality, in that the neutrality rules are more urgently needed as long as ISPs have unshakeable monopolies on a regional basis, but even if competition were more robust it would still make sense to ensure no ISP could become that predatory.

nostromo2• 11 years ago

But it's not a natural monopoly. I know because I have three high speed ISP options at home: cable, fiber and (decent) DSL.

Three providers would be unthinkable for a true natural monopoly, like roads or water.

sschueller• 11 years ago

Apple? If Microsoft got into all these problems why not apple who actively prevents 3rd party app stores and cripples web-views in apps.

blub• 11 years ago

Nice job there, trying to derail the discussion. Let's go back to talking about google and how it was blackmailing websites in order to take their unique content and display it directly in search results.

Any opinions on that?

kleer0014• 11 years ago

Do no evil indeed...

kleer0014• 11 years ago

Downvotes because it's obvious? No google bashin'? We like monopolies?

JeremyBanks• 11 years ago

Primarily because it contributes nothing to the discussion but also, yes, because it's an obvious comment to make.

If you have strong feelings about the issue, use that emotional fuel to write something substantive, or take it to Reddit.

skj2• 11 years ago

You got the motto wrong.

cordite• 11 years ago

I am surprised they didn't mention how they handle services and platforms. Then again, those are just conveniences to individuals, not something that can affect a business or livelihood like search and ads.

sparkzilla2• 11 years ago

The FTC report exposes the bullying of content providers, such as Trip Advisor, Yelp and Amazon, who were told that if they didn't want their content scraped they would be blocked from search results.[1]

And Jason Calacanis is all upset because the report says that Google tweaked their algorithm to hurt competitors, which he claims killed his human-powered search engine, Mahalo [2]

[1]http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/19/8260073/google-ftc-leaked-...

[2]https://twitter.com/Jason/status/578731213554233346/photo/1

nostromo2• 11 years ago

How can Google index content it can't scrape?

It doesn't seem anticompetitive to me - it seems like common sense.

flashman• 11 years ago

To me it sounds like Google wanted to scrape the content and re-present it in search results (i.e. "Zappy's Pizza Place ★★★") meaning people didn't have to click through to the sites.

throwawaykf055• 11 years ago

If they just scraped and indexed content, it'd be fine.

According to the report, for one example, Google took content from companies like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Amazon. In the latter case, Google lifted product rankings and placed them in their own search results for those products. When the companies complained to Google about the process, Google threatened to remove them entirely from results.

That sounds pretty bad, if accurate.

sparkzilla2• 11 years ago

Scraping page titles and snippets to create a list of websites is one thing, but scraping unique content from the pages that keeps people on Google instead of going to the source site is a problem. Say a bunch of restaurants are given star ratings by Yelp. If Google adds those ratings to its search listings then users don't need to go to Yelp. Google gets a double benefit: Yelp's content enhances the Google brand, and it stops them going to external sites. Yelp suffers a double loss: It loses unique content and loses traffic.

Google's Knowledge Graph is where Google scrapes facts that other sites have compiled, most notably from Wikipedia, and presents it as its own data. This devalues all the sites that have compiled the facts, but greatly enhances Google.

When Google acts as a content site in its own right it inevitably comes into competition with the sites it ranks on the search engine, hence the (inevitable) anti-competitive behavior seen in the report.

dreamdu5t• 11 years ago

Antitrust laws are couched in vague undefinable terms and do not define what is "monopolistic" in advance. Any and all business can be considered monopolistic under antitrust law. Rulings are ex post facto. No business can know whether they have committed a crime or not, and will never know, until government decides to bring a case.

It is vain, however, to call simply for clearer statutory definitions of monopolistic practice. For the vagueness of the law results from the impossibility of laying down a cogent definition of monopoly on the market. Hence the chaotic shift of the government from one unjustifiable criterion of monopoly to another: size of firm, "closeness" of substitutes, charging a price "too high" or "too low" or the same as a competitor, merging that "substantially lessens competition," etc.

spacemanmatt5• 11 years ago

Any and all business can be considered monopolistic under antitrust law.

That's not even remotely true.

No business can know whether they have committed a crime or not

That's not even remotely true. There are plenty of factors that characterize 100% of businesses not investigated (much less, penalized) for their alleged anti-competitive practices. It is very possible to determine whether a business carries any risk of investigation.

For the vagueness of the law results from the impossibility of laying down a cogent definition of monopoly on the market.

Again, you just aren't paying any attention. Regulatory capture has indeed made it far more challenging to bring an effective action, as well as de-fanging of antitrust regulation that served our parents' generation pretty well. But it's not actually difficult to use existing law to differentiate Google (natural monopoly) from cartel monopoly maintenance behaviors.

IBM• 11 years ago

The EU antitrust probe is going to put a hurt on Google, and it won't stop with just search. Android is going to be investigated as well.

Also related to this story is the massive amount of lobbying Google did to avoid charges being filed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-google-is-transfo...

themartorana• 11 years ago

...is going to put a hurt on the EU and its citizens.

Fixed it

spacemanmatt5• 11 years ago

Microsoft has repeatedly shown to have lobbyists working to cause these newsworthy investigations, but they have almost entirely fizzled, because they are little but paid-for press events for Microsoft.

Google was born into Microsoft's monopoly era. They have executed their monopoly in a profoundly different way. They don't have to commit anti-competitive acts to maintain their monopoly.

This is exactly the kind of monopoly we should want.

throwawaykf055• 11 years ago

Except if you read the articles and others linked on this thread, their alleged actions (if true) are clearly anti-competitive. "Give us your content, else we'll demote you in our rankings, which by the way is the biggest source of your traffic"? Really?

While they are usually more subtle about it, I am not very surprised. I personally am aware of at least one deal where they used their size to squeeze a smaller company. Only they called it a "level playing field" (https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/level-playing-field/). Sounds so much nicer! Except what it means is, "Our users want to take their data from our service to yours, but it's not 'level', so hey, give us something in return". And of course, who can forget the whole YouTube thing with Zoe Keating.

This has been a trend for a while now, only their PR has been pretty good at covering it up. Like calling it a "level playing field".

tomjen3• 11 years ago

So a bunch of senators are shaking down Google for a campaign contribution, eh.

jcoffland2• 11 years ago

What we really need is a fully distributed search system which can deliver results as good as Google in the same time frame. Such a system, which would essentially be just a protocol, would level the playing field. Add to that a distributed DNS and we would have a truely censorship free Internet.

caractacus• 11 years ago

You forgot the pony.

spacemanmatt5• 11 years ago

Every perfect plan that omits a pony is missing something.

That something is clearly a pony.

jcoffland2• 11 years ago

It comes with a pony.

alecco• 11 years ago

There are already projects doing open scrapping and indexing. Please donate money or time to any of those. I don't want to link to avoid looking like spam.

cromwellian• 11 years ago

Danny Sullivan has much better coverage and explanation: http://marketingland.com/ftc-report-google-purposely-demoted...

throwawaykf055• 11 years ago

The article (and the articles it links to) multiple times points fingers at other services doing things Google was accused of. But the "others did it too" excuse isn't as straightforward to apply when you have a monopoly. Same reason why Apple gets a free pass for stuff that Microsoft would be and was crucified for.

jrochkind1• 11 years ago

paywall?

Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google

Related Stories