Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt is going to be on the hot seat next Wednesday.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee on Friday released its list of witnesses who are expected to air their grievances against Google’s business practices. They include Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Expedia’s outside counsel Thomas O. Barnett and Jeff Katz, the CEO of Nextag, a comparison shopping search company.
Google’s outside counsel Susan Creighton, a widely respected attorney from the Silicon Valley law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati will be on hand as well. Google had first wanted to only send a lawyer to represent it at the highly anticipated hearing, but offered up Schmidt after the committee’s chairman Herb Kohl (D-WI) and ranking member Mike Lee (R-UT) threatened to subpoena the company.
Shortly after that threat, the Federal Trade Commission, chaired by Jon Leibowitz, a former aide to Kohl, embarked on an investigation of Google’s business practices.
Google then agreed to dispatch Schmidt to testify.
Schmidt has been very active politically, and is a big supporter of President Obama and many of his science and technology policy initiatives. But this hearing will be the very first time that he’s testified in Congress about anything.
The antitrust subcommittee scheduled the hearing after staffers met with multiple companies complaining about the way they’re ranked by Google’s algorithm, saying that it’s anticompetitive.
Yelp, for its part, has complained about Google excerpting its content for its Google Places product. Google has since changed the way it excerpts the content. Google also bought its own restaurant and consumer review content company, Zagat, which is sure to provide more fodder to Google’s critics, who charge that Google has moved away from its model of sending traffic to other company’s sites in favor of sending its firehose of traffic to its own properties.
Google has defended itself by saying that there are no barriers to entry to the search market, and that competition is just a click away. It has also said that its algorithm works to ensure the best quality results for searchers not for searchees. Google has also noted that companies often complain about their search rankings despite not following its Webmaster guidelines on what makes for quality content — as opposed to content designed to gaming of their algorithm to achieve a higher search ranking.
The Senate Judiciary Committee usually webcasts its hearings, so you’ll be able to tune in yourself.
