As predicted, the Federal Trade Commission has punted any serious action against Google’s monopoly dominance of search advertising and related sectors. Worse, it turns out the investigation was so narrow and ultimately so perfunctory that it’s hard to understand what took nineteen months to get such a meager result. Conservative FTC Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch [...]
With reports that Google is likely to be let off the hook with minor restrictions on its behavior, the Federal Trade Commission seems ready to punt on the most important antitrust case to come across its desk in years. Given how narrowly the FTC had been approaching the case in the first place, that’s probably [...]
Google recently made a radical revamp of its main search page, adding a new category of “sponsored” e-commerce results when consumers search for a particular product — and Microsoft is highlighting the change in a new ad campaign arguing users are getting “Scroogled.” In the past, Google kept a firm distinction between search results that [...]
Slamming Google’s violation of European privacy laws, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party of European data protection agencies issued its much anticipated report on Google’s integration of user data across the company’s services. Signed by all 27 heads of European data agencies, the letter and the accompanying appendix laid out the ways Google had [...]
The European Union has all but announced that it will find that Google has abused its dominant position to undermine competition online – and they are giving the company two weeks to agree to remedies to fix the problems that the EU has identified. The four main concerns include ones regularly discussed in the media [...]
We seem to be having two debates about Google— on the cultural side, the question is whether the company violates user privacy too much and, on the business side, is Google a monopoly threat in the marketplace? But these are not separate issues at all. Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not create Google because [...]
Now, Google is hardly alone in abusing patents, but a German high court’s ruling against Motorola shows that Google is just adding to the list of its monopoly abuses by playing the patent abuser game. The ruling stemmed from Google demanding that companies either pay an absurdly high patent license fee — in this case [...]
Last week, the big news was Google’s use of Motorola’s patents to begin demands from other companies for licensing fees– as much as 2.25% of every iPhone or other device price. That adds up to Apple paying Google a billion dollars a year for example. Now, all the firms are using patents as weapons and [...]
During the AT&T- T-Mobile merger, consumer groups warned that T-Mobile customers would suffer post-merger. Well, the merger was killed but the result for T-Mobile customers is almost immediately a downgrading of service: the mobile carrier is making roaming changes in order to “continue providing competitive pricing options in the industry.”… The limits will be staggered: [...]
Intellectual property is a broad term, covering everything from formal patents and copyrights registered with the government to the informal know-how protected by trade secret law. Companies protect some trade secrets through non-compete clauses and other trade secret lawsuits when employees leave for another company. But some states — and California is one of them [...]
