The likelihood of the United States government investigating Google for anti-trust violations increased today as senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee called on the Federal Trade Commission to look into certain alleged practices. Specifically, they believe that Google favors its own services in its search results.
To get a better understanding of where this is coming from, we need to go back in time to September. At that time, Google's chairman Eric Schmidt testified in person in front of the United States Senate's antitrust subcommittee. You can read a summary of the three-hour hearing from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land. The subcommittee meeting was attended by both Herman Kohl (a Democrat, and the chairman of the subcommittee) and Mike Lee (a Republican). The latter went after Schmidt “like a cross-examining lawyer at a trial,” according to Sterling.
So what is Lee's problem with Google? Lee noticed, and showed on a pie chart, that Google's shopping/product search results usually appear in the same position on Google's search results page, but their competitors' positions fluctuate. Lee seems to believe that this is a sign that Google is using one algorithm for third party content and a different one for their own content. As Sterling put it, “Lee argued that Google didn't hold it's own content to the same standards or rules, which was inherently unfair in Lee's line of reasoning.”
Schmidt conducted himself well, but the second panel that day really grabbed attention. It included Thomas Barnett, an attorney for parties in the anti-Google FairSearch coalition; Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; Nextag CEO Jeff Katz; and Google lawyer Susan Creighton. Sterling noted that Stoppelman delivered devastating testimony. While his company and Google started out as partners, after that ended, “Google...began including Yelp reviews in Places (a competitive product) without permission. Yelp...asked that those reviews be removed, which Google declined to do without removing Yelp from the index entirely,” Sterling explained. Google did comply eventually...after an FTC investigation was announced.
Fast forward now to early November. Eric Schmidt sends a long written statement to the Senate's antitrust subcommittee, following up on his September testimony as required. In his statement, he is trying to make the point that Google doesn't actually have “separate products and services” that they can favor over competitors' listings. Matt McGee, writing for Search Engine Land, quotes from Schmidt's statement: “...the question of whether we 'favor' our 'products and services' is based on an inaccurate premise. These universal search results are our search service – they are not some separate 'Google content' that can be 'favored.'” If you're interested in reading Schmidt's full statement, you can see it here, but be prepared to spend some time with it -- it runs to 67 pages and deals with a number of potentially anti-competitive issues.
The reasoning seems to go like this: you're accusing us of favoring our own products and services in our search results. But we don't have any products or services of our own other than our universal search service. If we don't have any other products, we can't possibly be favoring our own “products and services” in the search results, so you can't accuse us of anti-competitive practices. In short, as McGee correctly notes, Google is trying to make a semantic argument to wiggle out of this.
Google Optimization 
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