Tweet
The Washington Post is reporting that “the Justice Department has begun meeting with companies that long have accused Google of illegally skewing its search results,” and has “met with at least two companies in recent weeks.”
The fact that the DoJ is taking meetings while the FTC’s Google investigation is still underway is, as the Post says, a clear sign that companies are “losing faith that the Federal Trade Commission will act forcefully on their complaints.”
Who could be meeting with the DoJ? Well, take a number.
Both Nextag CEO Jeff Katz and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman testified at a Google antitrust hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights in September 2011. Microsoft likewise filed its first ever antitrust complaint with the European Union against Google in 2011. Expedia followed suit earlier this year, as did TripAdvisor and the French search company 1plusV.
And the newspaper world is littered with publications that have been put on the auction block after Google decimated their bottom lines — leaving Rupert Murdoch to fly behind Google and expand his empire by picking the bones of their carrion.
In short, there’s no dearth of of suspects.
But the fact that any company is meeting with the DoJ means the FTC should be hanging its head in shame.
The fact that anybody is even seriously considering Joshua Wright for a role as a Commissioner is a sure sign the FTC has lost the plot. Wright declared that the CPFB’s agenda was “aggressive and dangerous,”,and said “its existence likely to do more harm than good to consumers.” And because he has literally been on the Google Think Tank dole for years, he’ll have to recuse himself from any deliberation of the world’s biggest monopoly for two years.
Woodrow Wilson launched the FTC in 1915 to promote consumer protection and eliminate anti-competitive business practices. It was considered a key achievement of the progressive era. The modern FTC, however, objectively failed to protect consumer privacy when they gave Google the data stolen from up to 190 million Safari users. If they fail to take action against the biggest and most aggressive monopoly of our time, one has to wonder what relevance they have in the digital age.
7 Comments
Wait until the cloud computing concept, perfectly executed with ChromeBook, takes off.
Google will own everything.
I was locked out of my YouTube account, for over 18 months, when Google acquired YouTube, I am very fearful of where our “innovative, high tech” society is leading us.
One day, you are a member putting together lists of things that you find indispensible to your life. Then a day, or month or year later, your information is not reachable…
In the case of My YouTube selections, it was only my “hobby” material I lost for 18 months. But what happens when a person chooses a “Cloud” company and then finds it has been acquired, and whatever system of passwords, userid’s that were previously permissable before, are no longer permissable? (In my case, the underline in my userid had been permissible – then under Google’s ownership, it wasn’t valid. For at least eighteen months, till the company changed and went back to restore those of us who ahd been locked out of our accounts.)
What if that had been my business information I had lost? And it is my understanding that new computers don’t even come with storage media and back up possibilities.
Thank you for putting this out there. Google is now known as being a total vulture in terms of its ability to tell young start up firms that they should let Google buy them out – for whatever price Google decides to be fair! And if the young start up executives don’t agree, their company is no longer inside the running of “search expressions” that have results for their product.
Ain’t it funny that the very people at the top of the business world, that tell us again and again that the principles of a “Free Market” are always the ones that are doing everything possible to be destroying that same “free Market.”
Thank you for putting this out there. Google is now known as being a total vulture in terms of its ability to tell young start up firms that they should let Google buy them out – for whatever price Google decides to be fair! And if the young start up executives don’t agree, their company is no longer inside the running of “search expressions” that have results for their product.
Ain’t it funny that the very people at the top of the business world, that tell us again and again the importance of the principles of a “Free Market” are always the ones that are doing everything possible to be destroying that same “Free Market.”
By now it should be clear that the permanent American government is an enemy — perhaps, the enemy — of the rule of law, of the constitution and of legal rationality. It cares not one bit about personal privacy and the public and private integrity of any given individual. Even the most favored neocon and then spook leader David Petreaus found himself publicly shamed by a policing agency that could track his actions without sound legal authorization. If a Petraus cannot have a secure life what, then, are the chances that someone reading this can have for such a life?
What I find disturbing about reports like Jane’s is the ‘legal’ veneer the government applies to these dubious activities. It is one thing to commit a crime. It is another thing to commit the crime and then have the crime declared legal in any case. Spook agencies spied on Americans for decades. We know this to be true. It is a matter of public record. But they hid their illegal activities lest they disturb the “lesser people” (Alan Simpson). Today, however, the spook agencies and their corporate partners could give a damn about the sensibilities of the “lesser people.” This too is a matter of public record. What, after all, can the “lesser people” do about a government that abuses their legal person? Why, they can elect Jeb Bush or Billary or another neocretin in 2016….
Democracy in America can be found only in the streets.
I was watching the FTC panel on the future of data collection today. They were all talking about how there’s a big difference between personal data collected by private entities and that collected by public entities.
I was happy when Alissa Cooper finally piped up and said “Data collected by private entities gets into the hands of public entities and there’s not a clear line between the two.” No shit.
The collusion between public and private institutions is a certain threat to civil and political freedoms. This is especially true of those relationships meant to evade the law but implemented by institutions with police powers. This collusion can be seen in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, vile work that will damage Americans for generations. Phone calls, television viewing, internet activity, email, etc. — these are all ‘legally’ observable by institutions with police powers, who use the technical infrastructure of the telephone companies to make their observations. And, in keeping with the spirit of the new capitalism, consumers fund this hidden surveillance of their lives with the fees they pay to the communication companies.
I wonder how many years will pass before Google buys Comcast?