Now anyone actually thinking that I would be recommending someone to watch our wonderful US Democracy in action without some sort of understory obviously doesn’t me. However, today’s senate hearing (they are streaming it at 2pm EST) is set to cover the possibility that Google is a monopoly.
The US Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights hearing on “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?” is scheduled for today with former CEO and Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, scheduled to testify will testify on the topic of if they truely hurt competition in the market.
While there will be people like Yelp, Expedia, and surely other competition testifying to the evil nature of Google, they are planning to discuss or address the facts along 7 basic talking points (as documented in their handy guide to the US Senate Judiciary Hearing).
- Google is a gateway to the web and controls what people see.
- Google favors its own content.
- Google’s search ranking changes hurt a certain website or caused them to lose traffic.
- Google deters other companies from innovating.
- Google is hurting small businesses.
- Google used third party reviews improperly for its Place Pages.
- Google limits choice in the Android mobile operating system
Which if you truely look across their points, do you think they are wrong?
- It is a choice to use Google.
- Bing did catch up quickly as we also reported,
- Every search engine has shifted to providing answers, not search results in all cases
- Every change any search engine makes is designed to “improve the quality” of search results for consumers, not make it easier to trick the system with poor content
- Google’s programming tools , and open access to content has enabled more small businesses than have been stopped (heck count the number of SEO companies out there)
- Google still wants to be able to provide local business information (hence the Zagat aquisition
- Android has increased the competition in the cell market, especially in the SmartPhone game.
So, watch it, or tell us what you think about Google on Twitter or Facebook