Google Agrees to Change Business Practices to Resolve FTC Competition Concerns
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
To my mind, the strange part of the settlement is the FTC's claim that websites benefit from hits coming from organic search but are somehow harmed by hits from Google local/shopping results. It seems the only sites harmed by being included in Google Shopping results are those with high prices. I didn't realize the FTC had a mandate to protect arbitrageurs.
would it be ok for cigarette companies to put their warning messages in size-4 font in light grey inside the package?
However, as you have done, I often see this idea coupled with a quip like "If you don't like it, go find a new one."
Why do people keep saying this? It's clearly not a valid option. Doing fast, high quality search has gigantic barriers to entry. Some of these may literally be insurmountable because the data Google has archived from the past of the web will never be available to new entrants.
We simply don't have a range of search 'voices' to choose from. Telling people to choose from a range of options that doesn't exist solves nothing.
Personally, I think there's an argument for forcing Google to at least publicize that their search actually has an editorial voice to counteract the misleading idea that it was somehow algorithmically objective and free of bias, which was their position for many years.
At least that way consumers might question what they are seeing and recognize that it's not 'the web' but Google's opinion of what you should see.
It's true that we don't the bazillion clicks that google has logged. But google doesn't have our human curation, and brand new content on the Internet doesn't have a result click history yet.
Google may not have hand curation, but they do use manual raters as one of their signals.
It's also true that new content doesn't have a click history, but the click history as well as topological history of the internet can tell Google a lot more than just the history of individual items.
In any case, my main point here is that the position of competitors like yourselves would be strengthened if more people realized that Google wasn't somehow based on 'objective' algorithms.
You guys claim subjectivity and editorial quality as a strength and I agree that it is, but I think there's an argument that Google has been falsely advertising itself as objective and free of bias and could be forced to rectify that through advertising.
Indeed the reportage around this FTC settlement implies that Google has been 'cleared of allegations of bias', which is essentially the opposite of the truth.
Apple: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000021754
Amazon: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000023883
Facebook: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000033563
IBM: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000720
Intel: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000804
Microsoft: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000115
Obviously the nature of the agenda itself is what makes it good or evil, and there are plenty of lobbyists that do work that I personally agree with, but at the same time I can step back and say that because of the way the system is set up that lobbying disempowers individuals with whom I disagree but who do not have access to similar resources, and that makes me uneasy.
This assumes both that the ones doing the pushing aren't just pushing back against someone else, and that the someone else is a group of defenseless individuals rather than other corporate entities.
If you think about where all this got started you can kind of see where all the money goes. On the one hand you have Microsoft waging a PR campaign against them and funding front companies to make questionable antitrust claims against them.[1] So then they have to spend money telling their side of that story to members of Congress before the smear campaign can influence legislation. Then you have Facebook doing much the same thing for different reasons.[2] And they'll be pushing different legislation, so now they've got to pay someone to talk to different legislators.
At the same time, Apple is waging a patent war against Android, so now Google has got the incentive to go in and see if anything can be done to address the insanity that allows software to be patented in the U.S.
And then there's Rupert Murdoch, who seems to think that Google is the cause of all that is wrong with internet and the destruction of the publishing industry, and wants to make search engines pay to link to other websites. And the RIAA/MPAA accusing them of facilitating piracy and trying to pass SOPA and PIPA. And that whole Google Books thing with the authors guild. And AT&T and Verizon wanting to monopolize payment processing on mobile devices and anticompetitively excluding Google Wallet, or violating the open access terms on the recent spectrum auction, or whatever else greedy utility companies like that can imagine to do to negatively impact Android.
Oh, and China continues to harangue Google for not wanting to censor and so that they can advantage their own domestic search competitor, so now Google is under market pressure to go in and lobby the executive branch and try to get them to push back under the various trade treaties that ostensibly prohibit what China is doing.
I don't mean to paint the picture as "poor defenseless Google getting picked on by everybody else" because they're hardly poor and defenseless, and "don't be evil" doesn't mean that they're a bunch of saints or that you should trust them -- but holy crap. That's a lot of political fronts to be fighting at the same time. You can kind of see how it could be pretty expensive.
[1] http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money...
[2] http://www.wired.com/business/2011/05/facebook-google-smear/
http://washingtonexaminer.com/carney-how-hatch-forced-micros...
"If you want to get involved in business," Sen. Orrin Hatch
warned technology companies at a conference in 2000, "you
should get involved in politics."
Hatch was referring to the shortcomings of then-software
king Microsoft, which he had spent most of the previous
decade harassing from his perch as Judiciary Committee
chairman. The message was clear: If you become successful,
you must hire lobbyists, you must start a political action
committee, and you must donate to politicians. Otherwise
Washington will make your life very difficult.
Hatch's crusade against Microsoft was a formative moment in
the cozy relationship between K Street and Capitol Hill.
That coziness has become a prime target of the Tea Party in
recent years -- and so has Orrin Hatch, who faces a primary
Tuesday against conservative challenger Dan Liljenquist.
Here's the Hatch-Microsoft story:
The Clinton administration brought antitrust charges
against Microsoft after the Windows 95 operating system
came preloaded with Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer.
Though the case was in the hands of the Federal Trade
Commission and the courts, Hatch brought Microsoft CEO Bill
Gates before his Senate Judiciary Committee in 1998, and
gave him a good dressing down, ostensibly for being a
monopolist.
But it grated on Hatch and other senators that Gates didn't
want to want to play the Washington game. Former Microsoft
employee Michael Kinsley, a liberal, wrote of Gates: "He
didn't want anything special from the government, except
the freedom to build and sell software. If the government
would leave him alone, he would leave the government
alone."
This was a mistake. One lobbyist fumed about Gates to
author Gary Rivlin: "You look at a guy like Gates, who's
been arrogant and cheap and incredibly naive about
politics. He genuinely believed that because he was
creating jobs or whatever, that'd be enough."
Gates was "cheap" because Microsoft spent only $2 million
on lobbying in 1997, and its PAC contributed less than
$50,000 during the 1996 election cycle.
"You can't say, 'We're better than that,' " a Microsoft
lobbyist told me on Friday. "At some point, you get too
big, and you can't just ignore Washington."
"You can sit there and say, 'We despise Washington and we
don't want to have anything to do with them,' " the
lobbyist said. "But guess what? We're going to have
hearings about the [stuff] you do."
It's no shocker that lobbyists think companies should hire
lobbyists. But so does Capitol Hill -- Orrin Hatch
included.
In a 2000 speech to technology companies, Hatch called
Microsoft "knuckle-headed and hard-nosed," according to
Wired magazine. "I have given [Microsoft] advice, and they
don't pay any attention to it." In that same speech, Hatch
warned: "If you want to get involved in business, you
should get involved in politics."
"The industry had an attitude that government should do
what it needs to do but leave us alone," one Hill
technology staffer complained to Business Week at the time.
"Their hands-off approach to Washington will come back to
haunt them."large established players like tripadvisor, kayak and yelp will probably be fine because they already get traffic from other sources, but new companies will now have one less major way to get traction.
it seems that this paves the way for a future where there are no organic results atf for many transactional queries. search for "flights from jfk to lax" and you'll only see ads and google flights atf (as opposed to hipmunk or kayak).
i am not making a moral or business claim, just stating my opinion that this ftc ruling (be it right or wrong) will harm the ecosystem.
Even ignoring the first amendment issues, what possible way are you going to regulate the "fairness" of the ordering of search results without completely hobbling the usefulness of that search engine?
A MapQuest-fan's trash is another man's useful google map at the top of the search results.
Far better for the FTC to actually enforce their rules about disclosure of site-provided results, which have been on the books for a decade. Danny Sullivan covers the lack of attention there well: http://searchengineland.com/a-letter-to-the-ftc-regarding-se...
In other words, you would be requiring Google to remain static, while the rest of the market can explore the search result presentation space. That might help competitors, but it's bad for users.
You're also special-casing google, when, as noted in Jon Leibowitz's speech today: "Tellingly, Google's search engine rivals engaged in many of the same product design choices that Google did, suggesting this process can benefit consumers." Considering that today's result is because there was no evidence that consumers are being harmed here, would you be OK with your hypothetical labeling and positioning rules being applied to all search engines? Then we just need to decide what defines a search engine...
http://www.google.com/finance?q=yelp http://www.google.com/finance?q=kyak http://www.google.com/finance?q=trip http://www.google.com/finance?q=pcln
MSFT: -1.30%
FB : -1.11%
AAPL: -0.68%
NASDAQ: -0.26%
GOOG: +0.28%
So probably not moving down, and slightly moving up, is a good reaction.
It's not like they've actually had a monopoly (90%) for almost 2 decades. Furthermore, it's not like you can't trivially change your search engine in the next 2 minutes.
Another way to measure market share is by counting incoming clicks to websites from search engines. By that measure, google's share is higher.
http://thenextweb.com/asia/2012/11/06/google-search-maps-con...
I bet Microsoft has a much more consistent desktop market share in more countries. That is, about 90% everywhere. And that's one monopoly that isn't going away any time soon.
What we don't want is high marketshare and high switching costs which reduce the incentive of a company to continue to innovate.