Google’s Integration of Social Content in Search is a Good Development for Consumers
In the past six months since Google’s public disclosure of its Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust investigation, much of the debate around the issue has been focused on the evolution of search–how it has changed over the past decade, how information is presented to users, and where information comes from to provide users with the very best and most useful search results. As we all well know, search engines like Google have become an incredibly powerful tool and are hardly recognizable from their old format of traditional “ten blue links.”
Today, search is smarter and more dynamic–rich with real-time content, news, images, maps and reviews. Search no longer provides users a simple [...]
Innovation’s Cold War
As tech companies prepare for the holiday season retail wars, touting products with cutting-edge technologies, a costly war is unfolding in corporate America: a war for patents and, more importantly, an arms race to seek protection from frivolous patent-infringement lawsuits.
Because of weaknesses in our patent system, companies have started using patents strategically, threatening litigation to block competitors’ sales and stall the development of new products. These lawsuits cost millions to fend off — increasing costs of devices to consumers and dampening innovation. And the only way to fend off these suits is to wield a significant patent portfolio of one’s own, thereby creating the [...]
FTC Needs To Stop The Express Scripts-Medco Merger
Antitrust enforcement has certainly been revived at the Obama Justice Department. With recent cases against Comcast/NBC, health insurers and telecom firms, the DOJ has begun to demonstrate why antitrust enforcement is a critical bulwark for competitive markets.
No area is in greater need of an infusion of sound enforcement than healthcare. The healthcare debate demonstrated the dysfunction of healthcare intermediary markets — health insurer and pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) markets are highly concentrated and largely unregulated, and massive consolidation of health insurers and PBMs over the past decade has led to a long list of deceptive and anticompetitive practices.
Fortunately, the DO [...]
An Assessment of the Obama Administration’s Antitrust Enforcement Efforts
Yesterday, I released a paper at the Center for American Progress on the Obama antitrust record. In the paper, entitled “Reinvigorating Antitrust Enforcement: The Obama Administration’s Progressive Direction on Competition Law and Policy in Challenging Economic Times,” I assesses the Obama administration’s antitrust enforcement up to now and offer recommendations to strengthen that enforcement going forward.
The introduction and summary follow.
Our nation and our economy are at a critical juncture in antitrust enforcement. Increasingly, the markets that consumers depend upon the most—health care, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and agriculture, just to name a few—are becoming mor [...]
Google Is No Microsoft
Some of Google’s critics analogize Google’s conduct today to that of Microsoft’s during its heyday of the 1990s: Like Microsoft, Google is big. Like Microsoft, Google has hampered the opportunities of rivals. And like Microsoft, Google has abused its purported dominant position in online search by prominently displaying its own products in search results and excluding competitors. This analogy may be simple; but it just is not true.
I explain below four reasons why the analogy does not hold water: First, there is no harm to consumers. Second, Google is not a real monopoly. Third, unlike Microsoft, Google does not handicap or exclude competitors. Finally, there [...]
Internet Search Competition: Where’s the Beef?
Today Google announced that the FTC had opened an investigation of its search practices. This is an issue I have given considerable thought to. In an article I just released—Internet Search Competition: Where’s the Beef?—I explain that while Google is the “target du jour in the antitrust community,” efforts to bring antitrust enforcement against Google or impose amorphous concepts of “search neutrality” are misguided. I explain why Google’s interests are strongly aligned with protecting and enhancing consumer sovereignty and that government regulation is unnecessary and would only stymie continued innovation. A synopsis of the article appears below. The complete paper is av [...]
