Does Google Impede Competition?
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 20 September 2011, 18:48 IST
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Bangalore: Google Chairman Eric Schmidt will appear before a Senate Antitrust Panel over accusations of abusing its dominant search position. The Senate hearing entitled "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?" is a probe into Google's actions by federal and state regulators, and also by regulators of Europe and Asia. The hearing will happen on Wednesday, with some of the leading Google competitors also taking part. According to the tracking firm comScore, Google accounted for 64.8percent of U.S. search market share in August, followed by Yahoo! with 16.3percent. The power that the company enjoys due to its huge success has raised many questions. Does Google impede competition? Is the search giant giving its businesses a preferred placement in its search results? "Google is a big success story, but now concerns are being raised over its business policies and the responsibilities that come with power", said Senate Richard Blumenthal, a panel member. Google has allegedly abused its dominance in search and search advertising to add online commerce offerings in local retail and restaurants, comparison shopping and travel in its search engine. This has led to complaints from competitors that Google is favoring its businesses in search results. The co-founder and chief executive of Yelp Jeremy Stoppelman said Yelp (a site for user reviews and recommendations) has seen a marked difference in its search rankings since Google established its own businesses. "A Google restaurant search displays the places entry linked to a map, user- reviews and other services ahead of Yelp," Stoppelman said. Google has always maintained that its searching criteria are based on extensive user testing which does not favour its own products. The company feels user dissatisfaction on its search results will automatically pull them to rival search engines like Microsoft's Bing, product review sites like Yelp and social networks like Facebook. "The use of Google is only a choice as there are many search engines available for getting information," said Amita Singal, a senior engineering manager at Google. Schmidt feels the hearing has more to do with awareness. "This presents us an opportunity to communicate what we are doing," he said. "It is also good that the senators can now raise their concerns," the Google Chairman added.

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