Press Release
Consumer Watchdog today formally launched its new Website, Inside Google, to focus attention on the company’s activities and hold Google accountable for its actions. The sites’ URL is http://insidegoogle.com.
News Clipping
Those numbers might have gone unnoticed if not for a handful of critics who fear Google is becoming too dominant in its markets and is seeking to become too influential in Washington, D.C. Perhaps chief among those critics is John Simpson, a consumer advocate at the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog. Simpson says he would like to see the Justice Department launch a broad antitrust investigation of Google.
News Clipping
Every month, Simpson comes to Washington to meet with staff on the Hill and regulatory agencies, journalists and corporate lobbyists. Simpson said he met last week with Jim Tierney, chief of the networks and technology section of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, and staffers about his petition for a broad investigation. Last year, he testified before Congress about privacy and competition concerns in Google’s book settlement.
Blog Post
In yet another indication of the seriousness of the mounting antitrust concerns about Goolge, the Ohio Attorney General, Richard A. Cordray, has weighed in on the side of myTriggers, an internet search firm suing Google for unfair anticompetitive practices
Blog Post
Is this how it begins?
A handful of small companies crushed by a technology giant file David v. Goliath unfair competition lawsuits. A leading Silicon Valley antitrust expert lends his legal brains to the seemingly hopeless cause. Soon, a company that thinks it is all powerful and can do no wrong is forced to face up to the reality that it does not play well with others.
News Clipping
Consumer Watchdog said it welcomed the ongoing investigation into Google Books by the DoJ, and the Federal Trade Commission’s probe into the AdMob buy, but said it was: “past time to act against Google’s monopolistic and pervasive power over the entire Internet”.
News Clipping
Google’s treatment of rivals “warrants a full-blown investigation,” John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog said in Washington. Breaking up the company “should be on the table,” he said.
News Clipping
An independent consumer group will today call on the Department of Justice to consider breaking Google up because of uncompetitive practices. Consumer Watchdog says the $23 billion corporation, which holds more than 70 percent of the search market, has a stranglehold on the market.
News Clipping
Privacy advocates. The Federal Trade Commission. The Chinese government. They’ve all been on Google’s back recently. And it seems the company is now on Consumer Watchdog’s blacklist as well. The Santa Monica, Calif.-based consumer advocacy group is lobbying the U.S. Department of Justice to begin an antitrust investigation into the search giant. In fact, the argument has also been made that the company may need to be broken up.
News Clipping
The U.S. Department of Justice should launch a broad antitrust investigation into Google’s search and advertising practices and consider a wide array of penalties, including possibly breaking the company up, a consumer group said Wednesday. Consumer Watchdog, along with a mobile entrepreneur and two lawyers representing Google rivals, all called on the DOJ to initiate an antitrust investigation focusing on a number of issues, including Google’s marriage of search results to advertising and its book search service.
