Google Finds a Line Between ‘Aggressive’ and ‘Evil’

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
January 05, 2013

Google Finds a Line Between ‘Aggressive’ and ‘Evil’

By JAMES B. STEWART

“Don’t Be Evil,” the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, proclaimed in their 2004 “Owner’s Manual” for prospective investors in the company. Despite widespread cynicism, criticism and even mockery, the company has never backed down on this core premise, reiterating in its most recent list of the “things we know to be true” that “you can make money without doing evil.”

Yet the company has been dogged for years by widespread allegations that it violates its own pledge by manipulating the search results that remain the core of the company and the primary source of its enormous profits.

Google insists that its results have always been “unbiased and objective” and that they are “the best we know how to produce.” But for competitive reasons, it never disclosed the secret algorithms that produce those results, so no one outside the company knew for sure. A growing chorus of complaints from companies like Expedia, Yelp and, especially, Microsoft that Google manipulates the results to favor its interests at the expense of competitors led both the United States government and the European Union to take up the issue. On Thursday, after nearly two years of investigation, the Federal Trade Commission rendered a verdict: Google isn’t evil.

It may have been “aggressive,” as the commission delicately put it. But “regarding the specific allegations that the company biased its search results to hurt competition, the evidence collected to date did not justify legal action by the commission,” said Beth Wilkinson, outside counsel to the F.T.C. “The F.T.C.’s mission is to protect competition, and not individual competitors.”

The decision is “a huge victory for Google,” Randal Picker, a professor of commercial law at the University of Chicago Law School and a specialist in antitrust and intellectual property, told me just after this week’s decision.

It’s also a vindication of the integrity of Google’s search results and the company’s credibility. “There’s never been any evidence that consumers were harmed by Google’s practices, and no evidence that Google ever engaged in any manipulation that violates antitrust law,” said Eric Goldman, a professor of law and director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law.

The decision is also likely to set standards for competition on the Internet for years to come. It’s a blow to competitors like Microsoft, which has been stirring up opposition to Google for years, not to mention newer rivals like Facebook, Apple and Amazon. “The gloves will be off,” Professor Picker predicted. “The F.T.C. has indicated it’s going to be taking a very cautious approach toward regulating competition on the Internet.”

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