Is Google The New Antitrust Antichrist?

After helping the US Justice Department exorcise the demon that was Microsoft more than a decade ago, American attorney Gary Reback is preaching about why he sees Google as the new antitrust antichrist.

It’s a tasty tongue-twister to be sure, but it’s a serious matter.

Reback shared some great insights about how Google, with its delightifully devilish 66.6 percent of the US search market share, is impeding the long tail of vertical search engines in an interview with a San Francisco-based newspaper, San Francisco Chronicle.

Google scrutiny

Some background. The European Commission is aggressively investigating whether or not Google is deliberately dragging down the search rankings in favour of its own vertical search services.

Some anti-Google parties have been making noise about this for years to no avail, but this is no longer the case.

Now Google is facing staunch opposition to its $700 million (£450m) bid for ITA Software from online travel companies who fear it will stomp them out if it makes the buy.

The US Justice Department is scrutinising this deal to see if antitrust claims have merit.

More than a decade after helping the Justice Department nail Microsoft for bundling its products with Windows, Reback believes these companies are onto something and made his point eloquently to the Chronicle, which noted it’s “an open secret that he’s airing Google-related grievances around the halls of power in Washington, and at the European Union headquarters in Brussels.”

Search nutrality abused

Reback notes that while several travel, local search and product comparison search engines tried to find purchase on Google.com, Google built its own rival services:

“There were reports of Google penalising those nascent competitors, of Google preferencing its own sites that competed”.

Anti-Google critics are making too big a deal about this. Let’s put this in perspective. Google creates a search engine. Other search engines gladly piggyback on Google but then throw a fit when Google decides to offer similar services.

There are claims that Google is abusing search neutrality. Unfortunately, there is no law enforcing search neutrality, which is ostensibly a gentleman’s agreement not to show preference. Moreover, Google isn’t locking people in to search its website.

Search engine giant challenged

I’m not certain any legal entity can challenge Google over this, but Reback is building his case on it.

He also said the US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission tussled over who gets to tackle Google for these issues. The Justice Department is mounting the ITA assault, so it makes sense it would stay the course and gun for Google’s other alleged monopoly-building services.

Here’s another good one:

“At least theoretically there’s nothing wrong or improper in Google going into another business. But if you’re going to go into one of these businesses, you shouldn’t use the dominant power of the dominant platform to give yourself an advantage”.

That’s how Google works. No one will know about its newer services if Google doesn’t tout them on its search pages and portals.

Google: victim of its own success

It seems to me Google is a victim of its own success, but unless you can show me that it is putting dozens of companies out of business by touting its own services higher on Google.com, I don’t have a problem with Google showing, say Google Places, higher than Yelp, or a YouTube video higher than, well, the video startup du jour.

Google has been good for my information-gathering purposes. I trust Google’s services to give me what I need, so yes, I’d prefer if its services were easier for me to find than those of Startup X. For anything else, I go to Facebook, Quora or Foursquare.

Of course, if you’re not up for the whole Google Borg thing, if you’re not in accordance with what Google is selling, you’re not going to feel the same way.

I respect that. I won’t say the competition is a click away; that’s what Google says. But it’s true.

Bing will be quite happy to take your clicks, and don’t think Bing doesn’t tout it’s other services. It’s just that no one cares because the company only has a 12 percent market share.