Mimes, pre-emptive strikes and ice-cream: The Senate’s antitrust hearings into Google promise to be, if nothing else, quite colorful as far as business investigations go.
Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt has been interviewed extensively before, but never like this. On Wednesday afternoon, he’s going to have to defend his company against accusations of behaving anticompetitively before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee.
Still, if Google is at all worried about the occasion, the company isn’t showing it. On Tuesday night, Google released a brash, pre-emptive rebuttal to how it sees the committee’s line of questioning unfolding on Wednesday. The company has been just as busy trying to frame the debate as its competitors have been.
Entitled “A Guide to the Senate Judiciary Hearing,” Google’s post takes the form of a hypothetical tit-for-tat, with Google anticipating what witnesses will say and then responding. For instance, Google says:
When you hear, “Google favors its own content,” remember…
Google ranks search results to deliver the best answers to users, and that is the only consideration – not political viewpoints, and not advertising dollars.
“Using Google is a choice,” the post states. “Sure, Google has lots of users, but Google is more like a GPS for the Internet — a helpful guide, but not necessary to get around.”
The two core points that Google is trying to emphasize to the public are key concepts that underly the analysis behind antitrust law — consumer harm and choice. Under the law, businesses and agencies that bring antitrust actions against another business have to prove some form of consumer harm resulting from an abuse of a monopoly position. With Google’s share of the search engine market hovering around 65 percent, many people argue that Google has a de facto monopoly in search. Google has always argued that competition is always a click away to another search engine, and that nothing is compelling users to stay on its platform.
For his part, Gary Reback, a renowned antitrust lawyer representing several smaller online retail search companies including ShopCity and Foundem, told the Huffington Post Monday that Google is “trying to kill” its competitors by “manipulating search results.”
Reback is best known as an antitrust gadfly who in the 1990s spent much of his life prodding the federal government into taking action against Microsoft. He appears to be reprising that role with Google.
Meanwhile, FairSearch, a coalition that includes Microsoft and a set of specialized search companies that compete with Google, has posted its own guide to the antitrust hearing on Wednesday, and the nonprofit consumer activist group Consumer Watchdog has submitted written testimony alleging Google is, in fact, anticompetitive and should either be regulated like a public utility or broken up, like AT&T in 1984.
The group is not part of the hearing.
“Google has such a dominant hold on Web search and increasingly on other products and services, we think that a viable thing that needs to be considered by the Committee is breaking the company up,” said John Simpson, a spokesman for Consumer Watchdog.
The group is also planning to to prank the hearings by hiring mimes to follow around people outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building, the location of the hearing, and to give away free ice cream along with cards explaining the group’s stance.
To get a better understanding of the issues at stake, check out TPM Idea Lab’s July analysis of some of the complaints that competitors have lodged against Google.
Search is a complex business. While there’ll certainly be lots of theater and fireworks on display Wednesday on Capitol Hill, it’s doubtful as to whether there’ll be a lot of substance.
