Anti-trust investigation for Google?

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awesometbn

awesometbn

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Oct 6, 2008
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Saw this today but it seems like this news item has been floating around for a while. True the big G is massive, but doesn't this just smack of the government wanting to get its hands on some precious cash (hundreds of thousands, or millions) by punishing a company when it becomes successful?

Source: Google may face monopoly probe - vnunet.com

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.
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I thought Google was in the sack with the gov pretty hard already. I'd bet not much happens.
 
xmcp123 said:
/me does a little dance
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lol, good to see I wasn't the only one that did a little happy dance...

it'd be great if this results in google getting broken up, or at least adwords spun off into a separate entity... but I'm not going to get my hopes up just yet... the government moves slowly, and they could take years debating stuff before they actually do anything...
 
riezioVL said:
how can this be? the net has billions of users..and monopoly?
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The net have billions of users but that doesn't prevent monopolization.
Google actually provides the search functionality, and advertising service, for a lot of other players.
i.e. Baidu, China's major search portal, now runs it searches through Google, and merely applies the same Chinese government filtering that Google did. So effectively Baidu is Google... just more Chineseier.l
Same with ads. Most ads services you see out there merely rebroker through Google, either to the client or to the customer. A lot of parking services were already using Google's feed.
Anytime a potential competitor pops up, they buy them if they're small enough, broker if they're large enough, or pretend they don't exist if they're anti-Google enough.
 
When your head gets as large as the big G and you are now responsible to a large portion of stock market investments, during a time when the economy is sensitive it's timely that the government would say something like this. Google corporately now has to think about what they are doing from a different angle, knowing they are going to be held responsible. Great psych move, I'd say go for it! Just make sure there is some teeth in the bark.
 
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