James Best Jr./The New York Times
Multimedia
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
After regulators had pored over nine million documents, listened to
complaints from disgruntled competitors and took sworn testimony from
Google executives, the government concluded that the law was on Google’s
side. At the end of the day, they said, consumers had been largely
unharmed.
That is why one of the biggest antitrust investigations of an American
company in years ended with a slap on the wrist Thursday, when the
Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation of Google’s search
practices without bringing a complaint. Google voluntarily made two
minor concessions.
“The way they managed to escape it is through a barrage of not only
political officials but also academics aligned against doing very much
in this particular case,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of
antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has worked as a paid adviser
to Google in the past. “The first sign of a bad antitrust case is lack
of consumer harm, and there just was not any consumer harm emerging in
this very long investigation.”
The F.T.C. had put serious effort into its investigation of Google. Jon
Leibowitz, the agency’s chairman, has long advocated for the commission
to flex its muscle as an enforcer of antitrust laws, and the commission
had hired high-powered consultants, including Beth A. Wilkinson, an
experienced litigator, and Richard J. Gilbert, a well-known economist.
Still, Mr. Leibowitz said during a news conference announcing the result
of the inquiry, the evidence showed that Google “doesn’t violate
American antitrust laws.”
“The conclusion is clear: Google’s services are good for users and good
for competition,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in
a company blog post.
The main thrust of the investigation was into how Google’s search
results had changed since it expanded into new search verticals, like
local business listings and comparison shopping. A search for pizza or
jeans, for instance, now shows results with photos and maps from
Google’s own local business service and its shopping product more
prominently than links to other Web sites, which has enraged competing
sites.
But while the F.T.C. said that Google’s actions might have hurt
individual competitors, over all it found that the search engine helped
consumers, as evidenced by Google users’ clicking on the products that
Google highlighted and competing search engines’ adopting similar
approaches.
Google outlined these kinds of arguments to regulators in many meetings
over the last two years, as it has intensified its courtship of
Washington, with Google executives at the highest levels, as well as
lawyers, lobbyists and engineers appearing in the capital.
One of the arguments they made, according to people briefed on the
discussions, was that technology is such a fast-moving industry that
regulatory burdens would hinder its evolution. Google makes about 500
changes to its search algorithm each year, so results look different now
than they did even six months ago.
The definition of competition in the tech industry is also different and constantly changing, Google argued.
For instance, just recently Amazon and Apple, which used to be in
different businesses than Google, have become its competitors. Google’s
share of the search market has stayed at about two-thirds even though
competing search engines are “just a click away,” as the company
repeatedly argued. That would become the company’s mantra to demonstrate
that it was not abusing its market power.
0 comments:
Post a Comment