The U.S. Federal Trade Commission Takes On Google

U.S. antitrust authorities are preparing to launch a full-scale investigation against Google. Meanwhile, an anti-monopoly investigation is already being conducted by the European Commission. However, experts say that authorities will have a difficult time uncovering anything illegal.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been surveying Internet companies concerning Google’s dominant position in the Internet search market. According to Net Marketshare, Google controls 84.6 percent of the global search market, followed by Yahoo with 5.15 percent, Baidu with 4.3 percent, Bing with 3.91 percent, and Ask with 0.53 percent.

Word that regulators could begin a more thorough and complete antitrust investigation against the search engine went out at the end of the week. One source familiar with the situation told the Financial Times that such unofficial preliminary interviews of Google’s rivals suggest that the FTC would like to gather more information about the company’s practices, and only then decide, if necessary, whether to pursue any specific cases.

According to a second source, however, the FTC is preparing to send out formal requests for information. That would indicate an official investigation is already underway.

The possibility that the FTC could initiate an antitrust investigation was first mentioned in early April. But the regulator was waiting for a ruling from the Justice Department on Google’s bid to purchase ITA Software for $700 million. The company provides information on flight schedules and sells tickets online.

The agency had to decide whether the deal would jeopardize similar business travel services, such as Expedia, Sabre Holdings, Kayak.com and Farelogix. The Justice Department eventually approved the deal on April 9, but noted in its ruling that the government would have the authority to deal with all future complaints against Google.

Oversight of the anti-monopoly legislation will be conducted by the FTC and the Justice Department. But the FTC’s initiative is the first sign that it will play a leading role in any investigations against Google, not the Justice Department. Nevertheless, regulators will have difficulty finding anything illegal, according to experts. Professor James Grimmelmann of the New York Law School told Bloomberg that Google has taken a dominant position in the market simply because it is better at searching.

This is not the first antitrust investigation against Google. Since last November, European anti-monopoly authorities have been investigating whether Google is guilty of “prejudicial treatment” with its search engines. In particular, competitors have complained about the “privileged accommodation” of search result links to Google’s own services, including telephones, books, service price comparisons and video hosting of YouTube.

Among the complainants was one of the companies owned by Microsoft. But Microsoft itself had already filed a complaint with the European Commission at the end of March claiming that the U.S. search engine manipulated search results to the detriment of European consumers. According to Microsoft, Google’s share of the European search engine market has already reached 95 percent, in light of which the company did not want to invest billions of dollars into its own search engine in vain.