Inside Google

“You may well see something soon from the U.S. agencies, but I can’t promise anything,” said Melanie Sabo, Assistant Director for Anticompetitive Practices at the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. Speaking at a Consumer Watchdog conference called “The Future of Online Consumer Protection,” Sabo said her comments reflect her own views and not those of the FTC. The conference, held in Washington, D.C., was webcast over the Internet.

Gary Reback, an attorney with Carr & Ferrell and a prominent figure in the antitrust trials involving Microsoft, told attendees at Consumer Watchdog’s Future of Online Consumer Protections conference here that the European case, built off complaints by a comparison shopping engine, could demonstrate that Google has improperly penalized specialty search engines in its quest to maintain its leading search engine market share. The refrain is a familiar one among Google critics: that Google’s Universal Search unfairly promotes its own content over that of competitors.

Last April, Consumer Watchdog published this report, titled Traffic Report: How Google Is Squeezing Out Competitors and Muscling Into New Markets. The group formally asked the Justice Department to launch an antitrust probe of the search giant. But the European Commission beat their U.S. counterparts to the punch. “I welcome the European action, but Google is a U.S. Company and it’s long past time for our authorities to launch an investigation,” says Consumer Watchdog spokesman John Simpson.