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Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress

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Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress

#21

Post by jc4p »

electrichead wrote: post #19
jc4p wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait until he starts talking about why Google is bad, I wonder if any one knows about Yelp's "pay us for advertising or you'll have your good reviews deleted" policy.

This was my first thought as well. I completely disagree with him that Yelp would not have been able to start up right now. Google would have helped drive traffic to yelp now just as it did then. Edit: I think I remember it being "join Yelp so you can delete the bad reviews".

I really thought he was going to talk about how he couldn't create Yelp now because of Google buying Zagat but it seemed like his entire point was "Google is evil."

I'm glad the person currently speaking who actually understands technology (seemingly) and worked on antitrust law suits knows what she's saying.

Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress

#22

Post by chsonnu »

yanw wrote: post #18

These senators seemed ignorant about pretty much everything involved. And as for Mr. Schmidt he should have started by saying that Google is free, it's free for users and for those wanting to be indexed by them so they don't owe any self proclaim competitors anything.

What's new? It reminds me of the dog and pony shows with Enron and Goldman. These guys aren't skilled at anything other than pandering to the elderly.

Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress

#25

Post by kposehn »

kposehn wrote: post #23

Simply put, IMHO what needs to happen is Google needs to be pushed to stop blatantly favoring it's own properties vs. others. At the same time, it cannot become so regulated as to become a utility.

Ms. Creighton is claiming that competition needs to flourish - one important aspect is that competition in an ecosystem you control falls under this statement.

Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress

#26

Post by pycassa »

MikeCapone wrote: post #5
pycassa wrote: post #3

at D9: According to eric at D9, these are the top consumer companies 1-4-the gang of four(appl,google,amazon,facebook) 5-6(paypal,twitter) Schmidt said he believes Microsoft is “not driving the consumer revolution.” He doesn’t count Microsoft’s Xbox business because it’s “not a platform at the computational level.” today before congress: Microsoft's Bing has continued to gain in popularity, perhaps because it comes p…

Indeed, but one is comparing the consumer tech market as a whole and the other is just in the search market, so this isn't apples to apples (so to speak), no?

when bing alone can challenge google's core business, isn't putting the whole microsoft after twitter and paypal as a consumer tech company silly?

Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress

#28

Post by aamar »

The central question seems to be the following, articulated most precisely by Mike Lee (R-UT): even if the organic search results are entirely unbiased, Google also programmatically (via "Google Universal Search", the system that organizes the overall search page) inserts specific links to other Google pages--such as Places, Maps, Shopping, or News--in very prominent positions. There are competitors for all of those sites (Yelp, Nextag), but Google systematically (it seems) prefers their own version.

This behavior is relevant to an antitrust principle that a firm with a monopoly in one area/market should not be allowed to use that monopoly to get inordinate market share in other markets.

The senators do not appear to have concluded that Google is doing anything illegal, though several have used the words to the effect of "I'm concerned with what is happening here."

My take: I agree with other commenters here that the senators have at several points seemed to have gaps in their understanding of Google vs. the average HN commenter, though I didn't hear any overtly wrong claims with respect to the central question. Maybe this analysis is better done by the FTC (there is an investigation in progress there), but it does not seem ridiculous that Congress, which is somewhat more transparent, is asking these particular questions, which do not seem incoherent or pointless.

Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress

#29

Post by npollock »

yanw wrote: post #18

These senators seemed ignorant about pretty much everything involved. And as for Mr. Schmidt he should have started by saying that Google is free, it's free for users and for those wanting to be indexed by them so they don't owe any self proclaim competitors anything.

They actually just did. They argued that Google is free, and there's nothing to prevent users from using a different search engine. The argument seems to be that a large market share does not constitute monopoly power. In order for monopoly power to exist, there have to be barriers preventing users from switching search providers.
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