Comment by the_lego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_lego | Hacker News Reader

> Judge Amit Mehta dismissed one of the more significant claims [...] that alleges that Google rigged search results to boost its own products over those of competitors like Amazon, OpenTable, Expedia, or eBay. Mehta said that these claims were "raised only by the Colorado plaintiffs" and failed to show evidence of anticompetitive effects, relying only on the "opinion and speculation" of antitrust legal expert Jonathan Baker, who proposed a theory of anticompetitive harm.

> "Simply put, there is no record evidence of anticompetitive harm in the relevant markets" resulting from Google allegedly limiting competitors' visibility in search results, Mehta said.

As every business-owner knows, disappearing from Google search barely affects one's traffic. /s

> the court "also dismissed allegations about Google's Android Compatibility Agreements, Anti-Fragmentation Agreements

Contractually forbidding companies from offering competing products is not anti-competitive, good to know. I wish the judge good luck in their imminent well-paid lobbying job for Google.

> As every business-owner knows, disappearing from Google search barely affects one’s traffic.

This isn’t about harms to business owners from not including their business in search results, its about not including Specialized Vertical Providers (SVPs) in certain special-subject search results harming competition for general search and general search ads.

> Contractually forbidding companies from offering competing products is not anti-competitive, good to know.

The court did not find that such agreements cannot be anti-competitive, it found that the plaintiff’s in this case failed to present any evidence that the ACC and AFA agreements were. The law here turns not on whether agreements are of a kind that might have an anticompetitive effect, but whether they factually do have such an effect.

"Yes we barricaded the only paved road to the plaintiff's business, but do they have evidence this harmed them, or mere speculation?"

If you are filing a lawsuit using a cause of action with harm as an element, you better have evidence of actual harm.

If you are filing a lawsuit using a cause of action about blocking access, then you don’t need evidence of harm.

In either case, if the act is the kind that cannot avoid causing harms, then if it occurred, evidence of harm should be easy to find and put forward, at need.

More to the point of this actual lawsuit, acess or harm to the SVP businesses is not the issue in the cause of action here, harm to competition in the general search and general search ads space, where the SVPs are not competitors to Google but suppliers to Google and its competitors is. So, the lack of presentation hurting their business would not establish the required harm, what would be required is something like injury to their ability to sell data to Google’s competitors resulting from Google not presenting the SVPs in the specialized searches.

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