Google draws over 1 billion visits to its websites each month, making it the world’s largest Web property. But what it might do with that market share has helped Google become federal regulators’ target in a massive antitrust investigation.
It is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly — what experts say is illegal is how a company uses its monopoly.
“Have they unfairly excluded competitors in a way that will hurt consumers?” asks Bob Lande, a director at the American Antitrust Institute, a nonprofit research group. He’s watching the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of Google closely.
“Google has this enormous power, and they have the incentive to unfairly exclude competitors in a way that could harm consumers,” he says. “And the FTC wants to see whether this has happened.”
It will be a difficult case to make: Google says the site is free to users, and if you don’t like its results, you can go elsewhere for information.
And despite its dominant market share, Google argues it doesn’t have a monopoly, pointing out there are other search engines like Bing. But more important, it says the FTC’s notion of search is antiquated.
Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, explains that search is no longer relegated to just search engines.
Google has this enormous power, and they have the incentive to unfairly exclude competitors in a way that could harm consumers. And the FTC wants to see whether this has happened.
– Bob Lande, director of the American Antitrust Institute
“You can go online and ask your friends — whether on Twitter or Facebook — y’know, ‘Hey, I need a recommendation for a good bicycle’ or something like that,” he says. “It’s not probably always going to be about the Web. It might be bringing in things like social [networks]. It might be bringing in trusted experts.”
Stifling Competition?
Gary Reback, an antitrust attorney in the Silicon Valley, is credited with spearheading the government’s massive antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s.
He says in the case of Google, the government is also investigating whether the search engine unfairly puts its own results at the top. For example, if a user Googled “map of Pasadena,” a Google map might come up above MapQuest.