The Texas Attorney General is now apparently investigating Google on anti trust allegations. According to IBT:
“Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has asked for information about complaints from a number of companies, Google said on its website. Google specifically mentioned websites operated by Foundem, TradeComet and myTriggers as challenging its results saying they competed with the search giant.
A spokeswoman for the Texas Attorney General confirmed the probe, but would give no further details. None of the three companies Google named immediately returned requests for comment.”
Google officially talked about the complaint after Search Engine Land broke the story:
“Occasionally, we’re asked about the “fairness” of our search engine — why do some websites get higher rankings than others? The important thing to remember is that we built Google to provide the most useful, relevant search results and ads for users. In other words, our focus is on users, not websites. Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking.”
The three companies mentioned include UK-based Foundem, New York-based SourceTool & TradeComet, and Ohio-based myTriggers Search Engine Land’s original story said,
“All the companies named above have one thing in common. They are vertical search engines that allege Google is trying to keep them down because of the potential threat they face…. My view is the arguments are generally absurd. None of these companies are large enough to pose any threat to Google, to the degree it would be compelled to take such stupid action. Moreover, if Google’s going to act to block a competitor, I’d expect it to pick bigger targets — say like Microsoft.”
SEL pointed out last February that Microsoft is anabashedly behind a lot of the complaints about Google abroad:
Google’s public response to this growing regulatory concern has been to point elsewhere—at Microsoft. Google is telling reporters that antitrust concerns about search are not real because some of the complaints come from one of its last remaining search competitors.
Google hasn’t been shy about raising antitrust concerns about Microsoft in the last few years, either. This is the way that competition law agencies function: They look to competitors in the first instance to understand how particular markets operate, the practices of dominant firms and the competitive significance of those practices.
Microsoft acknowledges that it’s been trying to influence the relevant regulators with its opinions of Google:
Over the past few months Microsoft, too, has met with the DOJ and the European Commission. The subject of our meetings has been the competition law review, now completed, of the search partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft. As you might expect, the competition officials asked us a lot of questions about competition with Google—since that is the focus of the partnership. We told them what we know about how Google is doing business.
Tags: anti-trust, Attoney General, Goolge, Microsoft, Texas