Google May Face U.S. FTC Antitrust Probe

[engine]

Google May Face U.S. FTC Antitrust Probe [bloomberg.com]

Google Inc. (GOOG)’s dominance of the Internet-search industry is being considered for a broad antitrust investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, two people familiar with the matter said.

Before proceeding with any probe, the FTC is awaiting a decision by the Justice Department on whether it will challenge Google’s planned acquisition of ITA Software Inc. as a threat to competition in the travel-information search business, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is still confidential.

[walkman]

Someone had a graphic of how they occupy almost all the 10 listings in certain niches with Google products. When you have almost 75% share you will attract attention.

[incrediBILL]

It's that good old Panda karma swinging full circle.

Still not sure I see how anything like Google is "dominant" like A&T. Shell Oil or MSFT was, as in this case I can type "Bing.com" and dominance ends, there are choices.

Sure Google provides free services, so does MSFT, buy companies and then give it away free to destroy market niches.

Let's make it a fair playing field, DOJ should hammer Google and MSFT equally if they're going to do it, just split up everything into little pieces and we can finally stop discussing it.

[cien]

Incredibill, I think they mean a threat to other businesses they overrun with their properties abusing their dominance. Google Places, Maps, Merchant, Universal Search, travel coming up, etc. Bing, yahoo! are non-players as they don't have any dominance. If Google's properties were on page 2, there would never be any anti-trust issues. They are right at the top now; therefore Google is being anti-competitive as the dominant search engine.

[skibum]

It should. Even if they were found in violation of anti-trust laws what would the DOJ or whoever be able to do about it? It doesn't seem like they could do much to affect Google now. It would be kinda hard to break up a search engine into two separate companies. They could start paying attention to acquisitions though and force Google to compete by building companies instead of buying them.

Google might not be quite as dominant as some of those companies but they are close in the B2B realm (aka for online advertisers). The consumer can definitely just hop over to Bing or Yahoo.