This whole thing looks too much like a witch hunt.
The question is not whether Google does good work, or that its search engine is popular on its own brand & merit. It does and it is. The question is whether Google is using its dominance in one area (telling people where things are) to gain dominance in other areas (telling people to use its products over others).
Even if Google's non-search products are objectively better, it can be a bad thing in the long run as the next generation of competitors are locked out by Google's dominance in search.
Defenses like "competition is one click away" are disingenuous, in my opinion. Clicks follow a power-law distribution. But I don't know what the right answer is. This might all be sour grapes. That's what the hearings and investigation are supposed to reveal.
Gibson was investigated along with other companies for price-fixing. That's more collusion / cartel stuff, but it also falls under anti-trust. The word "trust" is not an accident. When you do good work and capture the lion's share of a market, you are then subject to a much higher standard than otherwise. Even little things you do can kill whole markets.
It's not pretty, and I haven't made up my own mind. But so far this investigation does not appear to be frivolous or arbitrary.
It came about because in the late 19th century it was still forbidden to one company to have business in more than one US state, and even to own stock in companies in other states, so very complicated arrangements had to be created to have a national "corporation" - these arrangements were called "trusts", as the Standard Oil Trusts, which was probably the first one and for sure the most famous (or infamous).
Later, the law was changed to allow the modern corporation and trusts were obsoleted.
The problem is in how you try to fix this. You could just as easily end up hobbling google with nothing to show for it but enabling the last generation of middlemen to stick around even longer.
(Nextag and Expedia come to mind...)
> That's what the hearings and investigation are supposed to reveal.
Here's hoping. These proceedings aren't big on subtlety, so unless there's a smoking gun, I'm expecting mostly innuendo and posturing from everybody.
None of those are surgical. The breakup of Ma Bell may have helped competition, except that instead of a national monopoly we were saddled with a dozen regional monopolies. It's all a huge mess and I wish I knew the answer.
Monopoly does not mean bad product. It means having nearly ALL the market share.
In actuality, there are far more heinous monopolies created by way of gov't regulation than in any other way. Massive regulation is an advantage to bigger dominant companies because it creates large barriers to entry into a market. Some companies lobby for more regulations because it helps them to ensure that others cannot enter the market.
Otherwise, smaller more nimble companies would come along and undercut the dominant company. This is how capitalism is meant to work but in these days or massive government interference in the economy things don't work this way anymore.
Look at the wal-mart strategy if you want an example. While there's competition, prices are low (sometimes even running at a loss). Once the competition goes out of business and you have a local monopoly? Crank those prices, extract as much profit as you can from your now-captive market.
Most markets have significant barriers to entry even when the government isn't involved at all.
Do you have a few examples of Wal-mart changing a product's price from low to gouging?
I don't go to Wal-mart a whole lot, but do drop in for this and that and I don't think I've ever seen anything that was notably over-priced.
But what I have heard about is them putting the screws on suppliers. In a world where they have less of a monopoly a supplier could say, "Screw you... we're not going to move our manufacturing to China to save twenty five cents per doodad", but now suppliers largely do what Walmart says to do.
It was the same with Microsoft 15 years ago, though AFAICT Google are nowhere near as nasty as they were.
Google's competitors have asserted that Google is using this dominance to promote its own products unfairly and steal ideas and information from its competitors, e.g. Yelp's assertions of data theft where Google Places is concerned.
I must have missed this whole "first" argument. In any case if you review the testimony I think you'll find the majority relates to the argument that Google is dominate and abusive. This may or may not constitute a monopoly.
The contrasting argument seems to be that there's no lock-in which apparently is a necessary facet of monopoly although it's worth noting no one but Google seems entirely convinced of that. It seems that if you're unfairly promoting yourself and there's no serious competition, it might be grounds for some sort of injunction.
Maybe the strongest argument against Google's dominance is that such a dominance coupled with self-promotion or the power to shut out competitors makes the barrier to entry into these industries very difficult.