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19 Feb 2009
Google may find itself at the centre of a US antitrust investigation after comments made by a new member of the Obama administration.
Christine Varney, who has been nominated as the new Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust at the United States Department of Justice, has said that she considers Google to be a monopoly and that it would be a suitable case for investigation.
“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” Varney said at a panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute. The US economy will “continually see a problem – potentially with Google” because it already “has acquired a monopoly in internet online advertising", she said, according to Bloomberg.
"[Google is] quickly gathering market power in what I would call an online computing environment in the clouds," she added.
“When all our enterprises move to computing in the clouds and there is a single firm that is offering a comprehensive solution, you're going to see the repeat of Microsoft.”
If her nomination is successful, Varney could waste little time in taking on the search giant. She already has plenty of experience, acting as a lobbyist for Netscape in its legal battles with Microsoft.
Varney said that Google had come by its monopoly legally but that she was " deeply troubled" by its purchase of DoubleClick and its proposed purchase of Yahoo’s search business.
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Do you agree?
Now it's Google's turn
Microsoft was bashed because of its monopoly-like position, and now it's Google's turn. Just like Microsoft dominated the desktop, Google dominates the web. Just like Microsoft was taken to court by US and EU, so should be Google. Google says that MS buying Yahoo! is bad (although MS is only #3 on the web) and then talks about buying Yahoo! themselves (Google owns the lion's share already). Google should be many companies, not one.
Posted by: Joshua Issac 23 Jun 2009
Google, utter, utter monopolisers (the correct spelling)
What a pathetic joke this is. Until the US Gov't deals with Microsux they have no moral right to go after Google. Their so-called judgement against M$ in the antitrust battle was watered down to the point of actually aiding M$ by creating another generation of M$ users. Get your priorities right. M$ was there first & with almost zip Google has come from behind & done the world a favour with real progress, something M$ hasn't done for a long, long time. I wonder if they ever did.
Posted by: Rex Alfie Lee 01 Mar 2009
Nope
Neither are a monopoly. Someone needs to read the definition of that word. I'm surprised at this seeing as the Obama administration is already in the pocket of Google.
Posted by: BP 25 Feb 2009
dependency as part of monopoly
To the extent Goog "rolls up" its alternatives, and to the extent it controls pricing terms rather than content, it is heading to monopoly status. There is already the well known "google slap" in which goog decides it can serve an end user's desires better than a given advertiser can, and prices that advertiser's ideas out of any possible implementation, thereby trading revenue for data-mining on the end user. seo and serp become ever more complex, until goog begins to emerge as the arbiter of seo skill, and then moves ever more into an authority position. At some point the body politic will need to discuss this trend in i/t, or lose the chance to discuss it...ever.
Posted by: gabriel bear 23 Feb 2009
Is monopoly bad?
I think it is. But why is the monopoly of google bad, and the monopoly of Microsoft agreeable?
Posted by: Dona Ferentes 19 Feb 2009
Google is NOT a Monopoly
I love it when people in positions of power don't know what they are talking about and seek out anger against the most popular "kid in school". Google is a company that began with nothing and grew to an unexpected size because of how well their products worked. Although google does sell ads, and does offer amazing technologies to promote such ads, they are still a "Search" company. Google has evolved in a way no other company has, the "search" component is the brain, the ads an arm, there email another arm, etc. When you have a complete infrastructure like google does, which is almost impossible to physically build, it is easy to attack different "parts" to destroy the brain. In fact google is the modern day stem cell company. It would benefit google if the government tried to break up the company, they would literally just inject a stem cell technology and get bigger allowing there services to be even more vast, even more productive. I haven't researched this but I suspect that google is not very helpful to the gov't when it comes to sharing personal information about their users, which most likely angers them. If the gov't is so bitter about this, they should through some some money at R&D to create new companies that can compete with google.
Posted by: Tony Cort 19 Feb 2009