
Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google - uptown
http://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-of-google-1426793274
======
sirseal
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
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
| ...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?

~~~
varunjuice
As internet shifts to mobile phones & apps become the dominant way to use the
internet, it will automatically diminish the importance of Google Search, &
the market will (is already) pricing this in.

I think Peter Thiel alluded to this in an interview recently. From what I
recollect, he suggested that by the time Feds act, the monopoly has already
been disrupted elsewhere.

45 minute mark of this interview [http://thisweekinstartups.com/peter-thiel-
launch-festival/](http://thisweekinstartups.com/peter-thiel-launch-festival/)

~~~
Chichikov
Apps are a temporary state of affairs (but isn't everything these days?). In a
few generations, your phone will be little more than a terminal that connects
to your personal virtual machine hosted on Apple/AWS/Google servers. This VM
will run the respective company's OS as well as its native apps. These apps
will be unrecognizably more powerful than the ones currently on your phone,
and your phone itself will be significantly lighter and more efficient (and,
yes, probably wearable).

Google will continue to make money from ads delivered into this virtual space
and it will also have more leverage to regulate 3rd party apps, giving it
access to the space within the apps as well. Oh, and also all these virtual
spaces will have private and public modes.

The biggest problem really is screen area. The only reason Google can't
exploit Android to its fullest potential is that phone screens just aren't
large enough to dedicate a sufficient screen area to advertisement (it's a
funny paradox: the phone as a real-life implement is limited to a form factor
that precludes advertising space, which by its nature is always limited to
'sub-prime real-estate'). Perhaps OLED will be the solution to this, though I
am more partial to drone-phones that hover beside their owners and use lasers
to project the "screen" onto special eye contacts.

------
sparkzilla
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-...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/19/8260073/google-ftc-leaked-anti-
trust-report)

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

~~~
nostromo
How can Google index content it can't scrape?

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

~~~
sparkzilla
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.

~~~
magicalist
I kind of agree about presenting Yelp ratings and only giving them the option
of that or not being indexed, but you go too far in the other direction.

Snippets in search have long been held to be fair use and, quite honestly, I
see the Wikipedia thing as an SEO crank red flag: even beyond the fair use
argument, Wikipedia is _explicitly_ licensed to enable that sort of
transformative use. Remix culture and all that.

~~~
rayiner
Conduct that's legal from a copyright point of view can still create an
antitrust problem.

~~~
magicalist
That's true, but I would love to hear a specific theory on how using data from
Wikipedia would create an antitrust problem :)

------
dreamdu5t
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.

~~~
spacemanmatt
> 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.

------
uptown
Clickable:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Inside+the+U.S.+Antitrust+Pr...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Inside+the+U.S.+Antitrust+Probe+of+Google)

~~~
bruceboughton
Oh the irony.

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

------
cromwellian
Danny Sullivan has much better coverage and explanation:
[http://marketingland.com/ftc-report-google-purposely-
demoted...](http://marketingland.com/ftc-report-google-purposely-demoted-
competiting-shopping-sites-122234)

~~~
throwawaykf05
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.

------
jcoffland
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
You forgot the pony.

~~~
jcoffland
It comes with a pony.

------
us0r
Related: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-28/google-
hel...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-28/google-helped-honor-
ftc-chairman-during-agency-inquiry)

------
tomjen3
So a bunch of senators are shaking down Google for a campaign contribution,
eh.

------
IBM
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...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-google-is-transforming-
power-and-politicsgoogle-once-disdainful-of-lobbying-now-a-master-of-
washington-
influence/2014/04/12/51648b92-b4d3-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html)

~~~
spacemanmatt
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.

~~~
throwawaykf05
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/](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".

~~~
spacemanmatt
> alleged actions (if true) are clearly anti-competitive

I think you may be confusing monopolistic practices with anti-competitive
practices. The former does not imply the latter. If Google were also illegally
protecting a monopoly (e.g. leveraging monopoly in another market, let's
pretend they have an office software monopoly, to protect their monopoly in
web search) then we would have a problem, but that hasn't been shown.

> I personally am aware of at least one deal where they used their size to
> squeeze a smaller company.

Again, the facts would have to show anti-competitive practice and not just
being bigger. Are they doing anything unfair like taking a loss in their
victim's market, or threatening their vendors?

~~~
throwawaykf05
It seems clear to me that these practices leverage a monopoly in one market,
search, to compete unfairly in another market, that is ratings and local
reviews.

The actual laws are more involved, including legal theories like "tying" that
I can't claim to understand (and I suspect most here can't either) but this
looks no different than what Microsoft was accused of doing, which was
portrayed as leveraging a desktop OS monopoly to compete in the browser market
(as silly as that sounds today).

~~~
spacemanmatt
> a monopoly in one market, search, to compete unfairly in another market,
> that is ratings and local reviews.

I understand how similar it looks. However, I also note that regulators who
are expert in the relevant legal topics have investigated and found no cause
for action. Microsoft was not shy about providing all the detail they could to
help the investigations in Europe, either.

My best guess is ratings and local reviews are also search, or 'search' isn't
a market on paper the way it seems to us as consumers.

~~~
throwawaykf05
Actually, investigators in the US "settled" with Google making some minor
changes to their services as concession.(And as TFA implies, these "experts"
may have been influenced by Google :-) You'll note that investigations in
Europe are not going nearly as well for Google.

------
cordite
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.

------
jrochkind1
paywall?

------
kleer001
Do no evil indeed...

~~~
kleer001
Downvotes because it's obvious? No google bashin'? We like monopolies?

~~~
JeremyBanks
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.

~~~
kleer001
Wait, I thought this was the new Reddit... but I kid. Point taken. I think
I've got a good feel for the culture around here, lately. I must have had a
small lapse into snide sophomoric snipery.

