Antiturst laws are hard to enforce in the United States.
Monopolies themselves aren't illegal. To be convicted of an antitrust violation, a firm needs to both have a monopoly and needs to be using anticompetitive means to maintain that monopoly. The recent "textbook" example was of Microsoft, which in the 90s used its dominant position to charge computer manufacturers for a Windows license for each computer sold, regardless of whether it had Windows installed or was a "bare" PC.
Depending on how you define the market, Google may not even have a monopoly. It's probably dominant enough in web search to count, but if you look at its advertising network it competes with Facebook and other ad networks. In the realm of travel planning (to pick an example from these comments), it's barely a blip.
Furthermore, Google can potentially argue it's not being anticompetitive: all businesses use their existing data to optimize new products, so Google could claim that it not doing so would be an artificial straightjacket.
It's not that hard, we're just out of practice due to the absurd Borkist economic theories we've been operating under for 40+ years. The laws are all there if the head of the DOJ antitrust division has the gumption to go reverse some bad precedents.
> In the realm of travel planning (to pick an example from these comments), it's barely a blip.
They used their monopoly in web search to gain non-negligible marketshare in entirely unrelated industry. That's text book anti-competitive behavior.
Google can argue whatever they want, but the argument that they're enabling other businesses is a bad one. It casts Google as a private regulator of the economy, which is exactly what antitrust laws are intended to deal with.
Upvoted - regardless how pointless some people might think this comment is, it really is the ONLY way that Google is going to drop out of its aggregate lead position.
Enough people realizing Google is trapping and cannibalizing traffic to the other sites it feeds off of, and choosing to do other things EXCEPT touching Google properties, is THE ONLY way they'll be unseated.
No clear legal path to stop a bully means it's an ethical / habit path.
Not saying there's any easy way, just that this is it.
I find those little snippets actually mostly worthless, maybe because I’ve seen enough of them taken out of context or basically using a snippet from someone who figured out SEO properly, meanwhile the correct information may be down a couple links or not there at all.
In fact Google had to make certain concessions in order for the Google Flights acquisition to get regulatory approval.
IIRC a Chinese firewall between Google data and Google Flights...but like many regulations they were likely written by Google lobbyists aka the industry experts. Because at the end of the day Google flights: 1. Still has the built in widget above organic results and 2. They still bid on their own ad spots jacking up costs on competition which is ultimately passed on to consumers.
Anti-trust in the US tend to not hit the big tech players as much they do other sectors. Also there is actually a debate in the judicial system about the extent of Anti trust laws themselves.
Chicago school basically published a bunch of position papers that made feudal corporations a legal entity that "aren't monopolies" because the give things away for free. Because the consumer isn't paying, it can't be bad.
The current anti-trust doctrine in the US has a goal of protecting consumers - not competition. What Google is doing is arguably great for consumers but awful to their competitors/other organizations. Technically, companies can simply block Google using robots.txt - but in reality that will lose them more money than the current partial disintermediation by Google is costing them - and Google knows this.
It's a tall order to convince the courts that Google's actions consumers, or is illegal: after all, being innovative in ways that may end up hurting the competition is a key feature of a capitalist society - proving that a line has been crossed is really hard, by design.
If someone could convince the courts that this is correct, then I'm sure Google would lose. However, I bet dollars to donuts Google's counter-arguement would be that the people doing the searching and quickly finding information are also consumers, and they outnumber advertisers and may be harmed by any proposed remediation in favor of advertisers.
Search isnt a single category. If you break it down, they arent a monopoly. For example. 1/2 of PRODUCT SEARCHES begin on Amazon. It's probably hard to argue Google as a monopoly if who they see as their main competitor has half the market share.
The US is so behind in identifying markets in technology which is what is leading to this dominance by a few companies and their resulting monopoly like power. We had already figured out that you can be dominant in only a subset of a market. For example Disney was forced to sell off fox sports channels when it purchased fox because it already owned espn and would have dominated sports TV. That’s the thing it wasn’t even just TV but a subset, sports TV. That identification is where we are behind. As of now no, one in the FTC knows what makes a market or why say YouTube and Facebook may both show large amounts of video content but are absolutely not competitors in video content space. It is because the functions are completely different. YouTube is barely a social network at all despite having users and comments and pages. Facebook is hardly a video platform at all because it isn’t profitable for users to focus on Facebook videos and make ad money.
Anecdotally, its true for books too. Amazon is a great way to figure out which books are the best reviewed before deciding to get one (whether paper, kindle or 'other means').
Anti-trust above all recognizes competition benefits consumers. And so “unfairly competing” is prohibited, because it is bad for the market, thus bad for consumers.
