June 7th, 2009
Fighting off antitrust, Google says it's not dominant
The Washington Post is running a piece from The Big Money’s Jeff Horwitz with the amusing headline “Google Says It’s Actually Quite Small.”
Google, Hurwitz says, is attempting to redefine itself out of market dominance. With its absolute dominance of search advertising plain for all to see (and, no, the very attractive Bing won’t do a damn thing about that), the company’s biggest problem is the scrutiny, regulation and lawsuits that come with being a suspected monopolist.
“We need to move past intuitive market definitions and actually look at how consumers, advertisers and publishers are shifting their spending,” [Google public policy expert and former DOJ antitrust lawyer Dana] Wagner said. “Market definition is job one, and hopefully people aren’t bringing too many preconceived notions to that.”
The idea is that Google’s industry is not search advertising but all advertising and thus it doesn’t control 70 percent of the market but only a very small piece of the action. This Hurwitz finds less than believable.
But wait! Google may indeed be trying to deflect antitrust regulators, but the statement is hardly ridiculous. Listen to what they’re saying: Search advertising is way too small a pond for us. Our pond is the entire advertising world — and we are working to dominate that, too!
And indeed Google’s ambitions go beyond that world. Let me point you to a quote from Rob Enderle from piece I wrote last year.
“Google’s intentions appear to go well beyond Microsoft and suggest a level of control and power that AT&T, IBM Relevant Products/Services and Microsoft couldn’t even dream of. For what they are attempting, the word ’scary’ is incredibly inadequate.”
