I appreciate the passion Matt Stoller brings to antitrust issues but his analyses are not good on the economics, to say the very least.
I agree that some of google’s conduct is very questionable. It’s not obvious to me that paying to be the default search product is pro-competitive.
On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) is this: we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. What’s more, the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google.
If customers are choosing our search product among two free options, then our product is better. It’s going to be very difficult to establish that there’s an abuse of dominant position in that case. (There is other behavior by google which is more questionable, but in search they are on firm ground.)
Having a large market share is not an antitrust violation, nor should it be.
I agree that some of google’s conduct is very questionable. It’s not obvious to me that paying to be the default search product is pro-competitive.
On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) is this: we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. What’s more, the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google.
If customers are choosing our search product among two free options, then our product is better. It’s going to be very difficult to establish that there’s an abuse of dominant position in that case. (There is other behavior by google which is more questionable, but in search they are on firm ground.)
Having a large market share is not an antitrust violation, nor should it be.