Commentators note that Google Inc. (GOOG) has launched an active ad campaign for an antitrust lawyer. The rapid growth of the Mountain View, California-based firm has made it the world's largest search engine company, controlling approximately 83 percent of the global search traffic, according to a
NetMarketShare report. It has also resulted in a recent flurry of global competitors lodging complaints of anti-competitive behavior against Google in the last six months, petitioning domestic competition regulators to institute investigative probes.
FTC Probes Google's Dominance in Search Engine Market
This month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has started looking into Google's search engine market influence under U.S. antitrust laws, according to a
Bloomberg report. The FTC has inquired with search engine competitors, including Yahoo! and Bing, as it allegedly prepares to issue civil investigative demands, the equivalent of subpoenas, for relevant market information.
In February 2011, the FTC hired Timothy Wu, Columbia Law professor and IT scholar, who stated in a recent interview that dominant Internet companies should be barred from monopolizing more than one market. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the U.S.'s main federal antitrust statute, forbids use of a legal monopoly in one market to gain undue influence in other markets. Even under a fact intensive inquiry, results have frequently turned on the regulatory agency's interest in a laissez faire or aggressive enforcement approach.
Antitrust Complaint Against Google by South Korean Internet Providers
On April 15, 2011, Naver and Daum Communications Corp., South Korea’s numbers 1 and 2 top search portals, have launched antitrust complaints against Google with the nation's Fair Trade Commission. The firms claim that Google is unfairly limiting their market access to smartphones that run on the Google Android operating system.
NHN Corp., owner of Naver, has issued an official statement that Google Android smartphones “have Google’s search engine installed as a default navigation tool, while they are systematically designed to make it virtually impossible to switch to another option.”
DOJ Conditions Google's Acquisition of ITA
On April 9, 2011, Google signed a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) after the DOJ's close antitrust review -- but ultimate approval -- of its $700M acquisition of ITA. ITA is a travel software that provides data for online travel websites such as Bing Travel, CheapTickets, Expedia, Kayak.com, Orbitz, as well as an assortment of major airlines' websites.
Microsoft and other Google competitors that rely on the ITA travel software banded together as FairSearch.org to oppose the ITA acquisition. While they were unsuccessful in blocking the acquisition, they were successful in getting the DOJ to condition the acquisition under U.S. antitrust law considerations. Google's conditional acquisition of ITA requires that complaints be made available for review to search-engine rivals and federal regulators.
Closing the Google Book on Digitization Plan
On March 22, 2011, U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin refused to approve a settlement agreement Google proposed with authors and publishers in its efforts to digitize scores of books. Under the proposed plan, Google would have become the largest digital book publisher on the planet. The federal judge dealt a blow to one of Google's major projects for monopoly concerns.
E.U.'s European Commission Probe Search Engine Complaints
In November 2010, the E.U.'s
European Commission (EC) competition authorities began a probe into Google's legendary PageRank algorithm that ranks the quality of paid and unpaid website content. The probe occurred after complaints were filed by two U.K. and one French firms, price comparison websites. Among the allegations, the firms assert that Google abuses its dominant market position by demoting competitor's search result placement through its coding.
"The (European) Commission will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services," states an EU executive, as reported by Reuters on 11/30/10.
EC decisions have tended to take a harder line on monopoly abuses than those of U.S. antitrust authorities. Both Microsoft and Intel were fined €1B each for business activities held in violation of EC competition laws. For Google, the EC probe was the first major challenge to its search engine dominance. The EC notified the DOJ of its investigation.
What does all this mean for any new antitrust lawyer for Google? Well, a lot of work.
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