Reason‘s Brian Doherty raises the alarm about Justine Varney, the new head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. According to a Wired article, she might be planning to go after Google.
The technology industry, she said, was coming under the sway of a dominant behemoth, one that had the potential to stifle innovation and squash its competitors. The last time the government saw a threat like this–Microsoft in the 1990s–it launched an aggressive antitrust case. But by the time of this conference, mid-June 2008, a new offender had emerged. “For me, Microsoft is so last century,” Varney said. “They are not the problem. I think we are going to continually see a problem, potentially, with Google.”
….Varney was suggesting that Google was repeating Microsoft’s expansionist behavior. Instead of dominating the desktop, Varney said, Google was starting to colonize the emerging cloud-computing industry, amassing “enormous market power” and potentially creating an ecosystem that customers would be powerless to escape.
Google is an innovative company that has made all our lives better. For almost any problem I encounter in any part of my life, the solution begins with Googling something. I guess that’s a monopoly, but it’s also good customer service.
Lawyers and economists say that things get complicated…when Google moves beyond search and into Web services like online spreadsheets and video sites. Because its search and advertising algorithms are secret, there is no way for competitors or partners to know whether Google tweaks results to direct traffic to its own properties over theirs. Enter a street address into Google’s search engine, for instance, and Google Maps tops the results. Type in “Britney Spears” and Google News comes up before People magazine or TMZ .com. (Google-owned YouTube tops the video results, above MTV and MySpace.)
Again, this is good customer service. Google is providing the answers people want.
If Google is using its search position to promote its other businesses, that could leave it open to charges of illegal bundling and leveraging–the same charges that Microsoft faced for packaging its browser onto the Windows desktop.
And the charges were just as stupid then as they are now. Not that that would stop the Justice Department and their war against winners.
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