The Wall Street Journal’s report this week that in 2012, Federal Trade Commission staffers had found evidence that Google had engaged in “monopolistic behavior” and advised that the agency sue, was more than a trip down antitrust memory lane.
The details in the report revived questions about the search engine’s credibility then and its motivations today as it moves into new areas. It also raises concerns over the ability of the FTC to protect consumers.
The FTC’s decision in 2013 not to sue the company ended a chapter for Google and some of its competitors such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Microsoft and Amazon. The company still faces an extensive, ongoing European antitrust probe.
Google beat the antitrust rap, as Politico reported then, by engaging in Washington, including spending about $25 million on lobbying.
This week, the Journal reopened the issue with articles on the FTC’s competition bureau report, which the Journal mistakenly received through a public records request. In it, FTC staff did not recommend suing over the company’s search practices but over three related areas of its business.
Much of the report struck Danny Sullivan, in Marketing Land, as standard search engine practice. But he zeroed in on the finding that the company “adopted a strategy of demoting, or refusing to display, links to certain vertical websites in highly commercial categories.”
Sullivan subsequently reported that Google told him that it had experimented with its shopping algorithm in 2007 out of concern over the quality of some aggregation and shopping comparison sites.
Again, I was reminded of the tricky aspect of investigating Google — behavior that may look monopolistic could also be explained as being done to improve consumers’ experience, a sentiment echoed in the FTC staff report. Per the Journal:
The “evidence paints a complex portrait of a company working toward an overall goal of maintaining its market share by providing the best user experience, while simultaneously engaging in tactics that resulted in harm to many vertical competitors, and likely helped to entrench Google’s monopoly power over search and search advertising,” the staff said.
Above: The Google logo.
