Google Says Microsoft Is Driving Antitrust Review 295
GovTechGuy writes "On Friday we discussed news that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott opened a probe into whether Google ranks its search listings with an eye toward nicking the competition. Google suggested the concerns have a major sponsor: Microsoft. In question is whether the world's biggest search engine could be unfairly disadvantaging some companies by giving them a low ranking in free search listings and in paid ads that appear at the top of the page. That could make it tough for users to find those sites and might violate antitrust laws. Abbott's office asked for information about three companies who have publicly complained about Google, according to blog post by Don Harrison, the company's deputy general counsel. Harrison linked each of the companies to Microsoft."
The obvious (Score:0, Interesting)
This is obviously just a clever way to try to get the courts to force Google to reveal their search algorithm so Microsoft can try to do the same in their crap search engine.
I have solid reason to believe Google is right. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've dealt with Greg Abbott and the rest of the Texas legal system. The Texas court system is so obviously "Justice for those who can pay for it" and Greg Abbott personally only responds to things that will give him good PR or more money flowing to him that I'm surprised there hasn't been a probe. Google is the financial jackpot.
Re:Oh please. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a non-issue. People use google.com's website of their own volition.
That has little or nothing to do with it. If Google is ruled to have sufficient market share for selling advertising based on search, then that gives Google a lot of power, including power to distort other markets. The law says, if they do have that power, it's illegal for them to use it to gain, including by harming competitors in other markets. Legally speaking Google cannot rank search results any way they please. They can do it according to impartial rules, but if they have large enough share, they cannot rank certain companies lower as way to gain in other markets.
I seriously doubt, it is the case tat Google is breaking the law here. Likely this is just empty legal harassment, but hopefully the courts will determine that.
Re:It's free (Score:1, Interesting)
Well that's true up to point but if you get too big then you risk becoming an essential utility and the resulting regulation. That's the down side of becoming too popular but that's the way it should work.
Microsoft has learned nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
The lesson they took away from the antitrust trial was "Antitrust is a way for competitors to use the government to interfere with your business." not "We were being evil and wrong and got into trouble for it.". The wrong lesson. They got off way too lightly and too many people were sympathetic.
Since they took that lesson away, now they think they can do the same thing to Google. They might be right, but I hope not. Though if their allegation has merit (which I strongly suspect it doesn't) I will stop trusting Google and be pretty angry at them.
Re:Once again Microsoft abandons innovation (Score:2, Interesting)
You have taught nothing! (Score:1, Interesting)
The lesson they took away from the antitrust trial was "Antitrust is a way for competitors to use the government to interfere with your business." not "We were being evil and wrong and got into trouble for it.". The wrong lesson. They got off way too lightly and too many people were sympathetic.
Or maybe...the reason they learned that lesson was because of how it seemed to them, the accuracy of which will be debated, but it should be obvious why it's applicable. You see that's the problem with punishment, if the party being punished is convinced they are being singled out, or mistreated, you do not induce feelings of guilt, but rather outrage, and a desire to strike back, and even use those same tools against your oppressors.
Harsher punishment wouldn't make a difference, if anything, it might have made people even more sympathetic to them since you'd seem even more oppressive, not more just.
If you want to convince people as to their guilt, it requires substantially more effort than just throwing more of the book at them. That's the easy way out.
Since they took that lesson away, now they think they can do the same thing to Google. They might be right, but I hope not. Though if their allegation has merit (which I strongly suspect it doesn't) I will stop trusting Google and be pretty angry at them.
I'm sure the allegation does have some merit, and even if it doesn't, you shouldn't trust Google or anybody else. Trust when it comes to multi-billion dollars corporations is an unaffordable luxury.
Anger is something I'd just advise avoiding anyway. It's just bad policy. It leads to dumb things like thinking you can punish somebody into feeling guilty. That's not how you teach a good lesson.
So? (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming this is true, so what? Google has tried to get regulator's onto Microsoft's ass. What's wrong with Microsoft returning the favor?
Microsoft is just upset (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not buying it (Score:2, Interesting)
I note with interest that Google seems to have developed a template defense when it's caught out.
It always seems to ignore the actual issue and instead starts pointing fingers at others for "being behind it". With China it was the Chinese government (ignoring that Apple has managed to keep secrets for years in the same country), with Streetview it was the respective governments instead of Google quite simply breaking the law, and now this.
Here's news: it ain't working. Get rid of the 10 year old who appears to do your crisis management and start dealing with the problem, because problems blow up if you let them be, stick your fingers in your ears and sing "la la la, I can't hear you". It is 100% irrelevant who is behind something - if the facts are correct you do something about it, if they aren't you prove them wrong. Just stop whining.
Pathetic.
Re:Don't worry Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
UK version of Google : "Bing" shows me the UK version of Bing first then bing.com
UK Version of Bing : "Google" shows me google.com then google.co.uk ....
This seems to be a trend with all my bing searches, the strictly correct but irrelevant answer first, then somewhere down the page what I actually asked for, whereas google tends to give the the relevant answer first more often than not ....
This is probably just the way I look for things ... your experience may vary ....
Re:Even more obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
It has repeatedly been argued, right here on slashdot, that if MS had NOT been found to be a monopoly
Not quite. Microsoft was not a monopoly, in the strict technical sense. Apple was competing with them, for example, as were a number of other smaller companies. They did, however, have enough market influence that they could act as if they had a monopoly. For example, in a competitive market, if you raise your prices then you lose some customers to the competition. In a monopoly, you just get more income. In Microsoft's case, the network effect meant that they didn't need to completely own the market in order to control it. Putting up the OEM price of Windows would not make Dell ship Linux or OS/2, for example, it would just make Dell pay Microsoft more money.
It's possible for a much smaller company to have a disproportionate amount of influence. When lawyers talk about monopolies, they don't mean the same thing as when economists do. Lawyers mean only the amount of influence on the market, not the share of the market.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Charging whitebox PC vendors for MS OSes on every box they sell regardless of what OS actually ships on a given PC, so that the whitebox vendors can't afford to preload anyone else's (for example IBM's) OS is kind of an attack by proxy. They were bullying the PC vendors to fight IBM for them.
Re:A simple search shows MS is full of it (Score:3, Interesting)
I was curious, so I compared searching for "open office" on Bing and Google. Google returns a list of sites that would be pretty much what anyone would expect, lots of links to openoffice.org sites, and some other related sites that all seem reputable. Bing is somewhat similar, except for one glaring exception. The third link (and for some reason, my eye was drawn to it, probably because the title was simply "OpenOffice") is to http://openoffice.org-suite.com/ [org-suite.com]. Note that this is NOT a site associated with the real OOo, but a site that tries to make money off of OOo. Now, this is mostly legitimate (I'm sure the OOo license allows it), but the style of the site makes it look like they created OOo. Their download link is to a site called "preview.licenseaquisition.org". I didn't try it (only Windows binaries), but I can only imagine that it asks for money at some point. I know I've recommended OpenOffice.org to people in the past and they've come back complaining about how it costs money. I wonder if this was the site they stumbled upon.
Google's results do not include this site, at least not within the first few pages. I don't know why Bing would feature it so prominently.