diberry - 5:05 am on Sep 26, 2011 (gmt 0)

The government was also out of its league with the MSN trial, but they came out with a result that changed MSN's path so drastically that Google was able to fill the vacuum and become what they are today.

They may not understand it themselves, but they have advisors who get it, who can translate what's being alleged against Google into terms the government people understand, maybe a brick and mortar business analogy. I'm not too concerned about this initial hearing not getting into every problem or asking all the right questions. As this thing progresses, they'll dig deeper, with the help of advisors who actually know what's going on.

Of course, we can only hope they get advisors who give them objective information and maybe point them to some of the right threads in this forum. There are plenty of threads that make allegations that are verifiable, if you got the stats from webmasters and had someone qualified look at the data.

But I'm wondering if they can't get all they need from folks like Yelp and Nextag. If they would uncover things like traffic throttling - which I think could easily be proven or disproven by looking at the stats of a number of webmasters who think they're seeing it - that would really condemn Google. They're saying they don't owe us traffic (true), but in that case, where do they get off deciding how much traffic you should have *overall, from all sources*? (Which is what some webmasters have described seeing - if they get a traffic boost from Bing one day, they get less traffic from Google, as if to compensate. That's the freakiest thing I've ever heard of.)