The Senate Judiciary Committee has set the date for its much anticipated Google antitrust hearing, at which Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has agreed to testify.
The hearing date is Sept. 21, and is entitled “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition.”
Google had previously declined to make its chief executives available to the antitrust subcommittee for a hearing, but appeared to change its mind after receiving subpoenas about its business practices from the Federal Trade Commission at the end of June.
Rivals such as Microsoft and others have been ratcheting up the pressure on Google for its business practices for several years, hiring public affairs people to convince regulators and reporters that the search giant is acting anticompetitively.
They’ve been bringing their complaints to the FTC and staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee over the past few months, complaining about the way Google ranks search results.
Earlier this month, travel search coalition FairSearch launched an online campaign to publicize its complaints against the search behemoth.
Google is already under investigation from antitrust regulators in Europe.
Google has started hiring its own army of public affairs people, and it’s also hired the former Department of Justice attorney Jeff Blattner, who ran DOJ’s epic antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s.
