Documents revealed from a late-September Google antitrust hearing capture Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, admitting that Google will "sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information," stating that "Siri is a significant development" and his previous statement that Apple and Facebook were not a "competitive threat ... was clearly wrong".
Mr Schmidt, Eric, is of course making these statements in relation to an antitrust hearing, where it's practically his job as chairman to prove that Google is not a monopoly and that it does have real and significant competition; and so how much of what Eric has stated he believes himself is another matter altogether.
Eric went on to make some compelling arguments on behalf of Google's competitors, highlighting the success of Microsoft's Bing search engine; that it had already reached the size Google was in 2007 and that both Bing and Yahoo! currently "handle millions more queries that Google did in 2003".
FairSearch.org, a strongly anti-Google consortium, said in a statement: "Google's denial of its own monopoly power is not only laughable, but proof that the Senate and federal, state and international law enforcement agencies must continue to search for the truth about how Google uses its enormous power to advantage itself and hurt competitors trying to reach consumers on the internet."
We found this statement to be overly rich; Microsoft, who has been accused and found to be in violation of various antitrust offences over the years and who is a large Google competitor, is also a member of the consortium. Adding further richness to the mix, another member is TripAdvisor, who can attribute large elements of its success to the tight integration of the Google Maps API and the exposure the site receives from the Google search engine. To top-off this recipe for irony, head on over to Bing, give it a shot and draw your own conclusions on whether the success (or lack there of) of Bing is a result of anti-competitiveness on behalf of Google or if another factor may be at play, we suspect you may find the latter to be the case.
This whole matter baffles us a little, as even if Google prioritises its own services in rankings, these services are generally spired from user demand, it does not sell any products directly and relies on quality services to keep users typing in that all-important Google.com or Google.x web address. Perhaps you could accuse Google of having a foothold in a market where users want convenience over choice, but then Google easily ousted Yahoo! years back as newcomer to the search-engine community.
Frankly this writer would rather FairSearch.org takes its highly hypocritical statement and place it where the sun don't shine, as opposed to our governments spending even more taxpayer money, given the current economical climate, on continuing the "search for the truth". Of course, this writer could be missing critical factors in his argument; let us know what you think.
