Google Antitrust: Allegations and Defense

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ALLEGATION: Google is Buying Everyone! Is the Company TOO BIG?
In 2011, Google has purchased or proposed to buy no less than twenty organizations to enhance its growing stable of services including: Google Books, Google Translate, Google Offers, Google+, Google Wallet etc. etc.

A penalty flag was thrown when Google put in a $12.5b bid for mobile hardware manufacturer, Motorola Mobility. Some speculated that as the owner of the Android operating system that runs most if not all of Motorola handsets, Google was treading into vertical monopoly territory with its pending acquisition of the company that made the actual phones.

Rebuttal: There is evidence that Google’s driving force behind the purchase of Motorola was to acquire a patent portfolio that could be used to defend the company from legal attacks by Apple and Microsoft over patents. The world of the patent lawsuit is a highly competitive and sometimes abstruse terrain–not a terrain you can navigate without counsel–and Silicon Valley has been absorbed in this type of activity of late. In short, owning Motorola is a defensive strategy, not a bid for mobile dominance, because Google does indeed need every single one of its manufacturing partners in order to maintain the success of the Android platform.

ALLEGATION: Google is trying to bias search results in favor of its own services
This increasingly ubiquitous suite of applications Google offers is apparently roughing some feathers in the e-commerce sphere. In the opening remarks of the hearing, Herb Kohl stated that various companies including Yelp and Nextag, “allege that Google is trying to leverage its dominance in Internet search into key areas of Internet commerce where it stand to capture from its competitors billions of dollars in revenue.”

Rebuttal: If you enter the term “internet search” into Google, the number one search result is Dogpile.com, with Google coming in second, Yahoo! and Bing factor in further down the line. If cooking allegations were true, Google would be the number one result.

ALLEGATION: Why is the Algorithm Hidden! Please show it!
The real thorn in the side of the prosecution’s argument lies at Google’s heart: the algorithm that ranks sites by a number of mysterious factors including “rich content”, User experience metrics (how fast does the site load?), and bounce rate (percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site). There are, however, a number of other factors with a direct effect on website rankings that remains unknown to anyone outside Google.

Google has made an attempt to lift a bit of the mystery, establishing a set of guidelines, to help webmasters and designers achieve higher ranking in search results.

However, the algorithm running this all remains behind closed doors. Some senators showed concern with this and pointed it out as a potentially anti-competitive practice in a competitive space.

Rebuttal: The problem with this is simple — if the algorithm code was made public, it could be manipulated and gamed to bring any website to the top of any and all search rankings. A search for “body spray” could turn up an unsavory adult website that played all the algorithm metrics to the extreme, tricking it into thinking the “content” on that particular site was relevant to people searching for body spray.

It’s an issue of transparency vs. usability and also one of trust. People who use Google have to trust that the algorithm is being used for good.