We expect more from Eric Schmidt.
This is the guy who pushed antitrust regulators to get involved in the tech industry throughout his career at Sun and Novell. He wrote the book on how “tying” a new product to your existing technological monopoly should be considered an aggressive, anticompetitive act. He should know better, but he still oversaw Google’s launch of Search+ at a time when regulators are looking for a smoking gun.
Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, many in Silicon Valley continued to defend Google as a company that mostly “Did No Evil.” They had friends at Google and believed in honest competition… but that was back when Silicon Valley’s social media darlings, Facebook and Twitter, were being spared from the hardball tactics Google has used against Kayak, MapQuest, Yelp, and others…
Search+ changes the game. The decision to promote results from Google+ within Google’s dominant search engine while excluding other social networks is a game changer. Google+ is Google’s attempt to get into the social networking game and turn back the tide against Facebook and Twitter, and the decision to leverage their dominance of Internet search to gain market share is a clear “No-No” for regulators. And Twitter is ALREADY calling Google’s decision into question. In a blog post yesterday, Twitter general counsel (formerly Google’s GC) Alex McGilvray fired a warning shot that should raise a lot of eyebrows in DC:
“As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”
However, what is particularly troubling for Google is that we are now seeing its most ardent defenders start to turn on the company. Two key Silicon Valley bloggers who had previously discounted antitrust concerns about Google see this as a turning point.
Former TechCrunch writer turned CrunchFund VC, MG Siegler really broke this story with a post entitled “Antitrust+” in which he argued:
How on Earth is Google going to avoid antitrust inquiries with their new Search+ features announced today? If Facebook, Twitter, etc, have any decent presence in DC, the ball began rolling a few hours ago.
This is the type of case that Senators die for. Google wrapped it in a bow and placed it in one of their laps.
Most of the broader antitrust concerns against Google are bullshit in my opinion. You can argue that they have a monopoly on search, but it’s a natural one. They’ve earned it. They’re simply better at search than their competitors. This has always been true. It remains true.
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But this, at first glance, seems decidedly worse. Google is using Search to propel their social network. They might say it’s “not a social network, it’s a part of Google”, but no one is going to buy that. They were late to the game in social and this is the best catchup strategy ever.
Silicon Valley Startup Blog, GigaOM:
The implication is clear: that Google, as the world’s dominant search engine, is using its market position to promote its own social network at the expense of other networks such as Twitter, and that this isn’t just anti-competitive, but bad for the internet — and for web users, publishers and the news industry as a whole. That kind of complaint is virtually tailor-made to appeal to antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and/or the Justice Department, who are already investigating the search company for what critics say is abuse of its market dominance and promotion of its own products.
While many — including us — have argued that an antitrust investigation into Google is a mistake, in part because such investigations rarely have any salutary effect on the market they are trying to regulate, this kind of promotion of results from its own social network is going to be like a red flag to the antitrust bulls. As search expert Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land suggests, it would be a lot more palatable if Google was also showing results from other social networks (and the launch of these features may well be an attempt to pressure Twitter and Facebook to provide that data).
What remains incredibly puzzling is how Eric Schmidt thought any of this was good idea in the context of several open antitrust investigations around the world.