FTC staff recommended suing Google for abusing monopoly
Source: Jessica Guynn
FTC staff recommended suing Google for abusing its monopoly power, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Google came close to being sued by the Federal Trade Commission for abusing its monopoly power and engaging in anticompetitive practices in 2012, according to a document obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
The previously undisclosed report by FTC staffers alleged the technology giant’s conduct “has resulted ― and will result ― in real harm to consumers and to innovation” in the search market and that Google’s actions resulted in “significant harm” to its competitors.
The staffers recommended that the commission bring a lawsuit.
Instead, the FTC’s commissioners voted unanimously in early 2013 to end the 19-month probe after Google agreed to make some voluntary changes.
Among the findings: Google “scraped” content from rivals such as Yelp and TripAdvisor and manipulated search results to promote its own services for such things as shopping and travel even when its services were not as helpful to consumers so as not to lose out on advertising revenue.
The findings echo longstanding complaints from Google rivals.
Concluded the FTC staff: Google is a company “working toward an overall goal of maintaining its market share by providing the best user experience, while simultaneously engaging in tactics that resulted in harm to many vertical competitors, and likely helped to entrench Google’s monopoly power over search and search advertising.”
The recommendations of FTC staff are supposed to be private. The Wall Street Journal said the FTC inadvertently disclosed the report through an open-records request.
The newspaper reviewed portions of it. The FTC declined to make available the redacted portions of the report.
Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in a statement to the newspaper on Thursday: “After an exhaustive 19-month review, covering nine million pages of documents and many hours of testimony, the FTC staff and all five FTC Commissioners agreed that there was no need to take action on how we rank and display search results.”
“Speculation about potential consumer harm turned out to be entirely wrong,” he said. “Since the investigation closed two years ago, the ways people access information online have only increased, giving consumers more choice than ever before.”
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