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Google Isn’t ‘Leveraging Its Dominance,’ It’s Fighting To Avoid Obsolescence

Geoffrey Manne —  12 March 2012

Six months may not seem a great deal of time in the general business world, but in the Internet space it’s a lifetime as new websites, tools and features are introduced every day that change where and how users get and share information. The rise of Facebook is a great example: the social networking platform that didn’t exist in early 2004 filed paperwork last month to launch what is expected to be one of the largest IPOs in history. To put it in perspective, Ford Motor went public nearly forty years after it was founded.

This incredible pace of innovation is seen throughout the Internet, and since Google’s public disclosure of its Federal Trade Commission antitrust investigation just this past June, there have been many dynamic changes to the landscape of the Internet Search market. And as the needs and expectations of consumers continue to evolve, Internet search must adapt – and quickly – to shifting demand.

One noteworthy development was the release of Siri by Apple, which was introduced to the world in late 2011 on the most recent iPhone. Today, many consider it the best voice recognition application in history, but its potential really lies in its ability revolutionize the way we search the Internet, answer questions and consume information. As Eric Jackson of Forbes noted, in the future it may even be a “Google killer.”

Of this we can be certain: Siri is the latest (though certainly not the last) game changer in Internet search, and it has certainly begun to change people’s expectations about both the process and the results of search. The search box, once needed to connect us with information on the web, is dead or dying. In its place is an application that feels intuitive and personal. Siri has become a near-indispensible entry point, and search engines are merely the back-end. And while a new feature, Siri’s expansion is inevitable. In fact, it is rumored that Apple is diligently working on Siri-enabled televisions – an entirely new market for the company.

The past six months have also brought the convergence of social media and search engines, as first Bing and more recently Google have incorporated information from a social network into their search results. Again we see technology adapting and responding to the once-unimagined way individuals find, analyze and accept information. Instead of relying on traditional, mechanical search results and the opinions of strangers, this new convergence allows users to find data and receive input directly from people in their social world, offering results curated by friends and associates.

As Social networks become more integrated with the Internet at large, reviews from trusted contacts will continue to change the way that users search for information. As David Worlock put it in a post titled, “Decline and Fall of the Google Empire,” “Facebook and its successors become the consumer research environment. Search by asking someone you know, or at least have a connection with, and get recommendations and references which take you right to the place where you buy.” The addition of social data to search results lends a layer of novel, trusted data to users’ results. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan agreed writing, “The new system will perhaps make life much easier for some people, allowing them to find both privately shared content from friends and family plus material from across the web through a single search, rather than having to search twice using two different systems.”It only makes sense, from a competition perspective, that Google followed suit and recently merged its social and search data in an effort to make search more relevant and personal.

Inevitably, a host of Google’s critics and competitors has cried foul. In fact, as Google has adapted and evolved from its original template to offer users not only links to URLs but also maps, flight information, product pages, videos and now social media inputs, it has met with a curious resistance at every turn. And, indeed, judged against a world in which Internet search is limited to “ten blue links,” with actual content – answers to questions – residing outside of Google’s purview, it has significantly expanded its reach and brought itself (and its large user base) into direct competition with a host of new entities.

But the worldview that judges these adaptations as unwarranted extensions of Google’s platform from its initial baseline, itself merely a function of the relatively limited technology and nascent consumer demand present at the firm’s inception, is dangerously crabbed. By challenging Google’s evolution as “leveraging its dominance” into new and distinct markets, rather than celebrating its efforts (and those of Apple, Bing and Facebook, for that matter) to offer richer, more-responsive and varied forms of information, this view denies the essential reality of technological evolution and exalts outdated technology and outmoded business practices.

And while Google’s forays into the protected realms of others’ business models grab the headlines, it is also feverishly working to adapt its core technology, as well, most recently (and ambitiously) with its “Google Knowledge Graph” project, aimed squarely at transforming the algorithmic guts of its core search function into something more intelligent and refined than its current word-based index permits. In concept, this is, in fact, no different than its efforts to bootstrap social network data into its current structure: Both are efforts to improve on the mechanical process built on Google’s PageRank technology to offer more relevant search results informed by a better understanding of the mercurial way people actually think.

Expanding consumer welfare requires that Google, like its ever-shifting roster of competitors, must be able to keep up with the pace and the unanticipated twists and turns of innovation. As The Economist recently said, “Kodak was the Google of its day,” and the analogy is decidedly apt. Without the drive or ability to evolve and reinvent itself, its products and its business model, Kodak has fallen to its competitors in the marketplace. Once revered as a powerhouse of technological innovation for most of its history, Kodak now faces bankruptcy because it failed to adapt to its own success. Having invented the digital camera, Kodak radically altered the very definition of its market. But by hewing to its own metaphorical ten blue links – traditional film – instead of understanding that consumer photography had come to mean something dramatically different, Kodak consigned itself to failure.

Like Kodak and every other technology company before it, Google must be willing and able to adapt and evolve; just as for Lewis Carol’s Red Queen, “here it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Neither consumers nor firms are well served by regulatory policy informed by nostalgia. Even more so than Kodak, Google confronts a near-constantly evolving marketplace and fierce competition from unanticipated quarters. If regulators force it to stop running, the market will simply pass it by.

[Cross posted at Forbes]

In google, technology, truth on the market , , ,
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Fed should stay out of Google/Twitter social search spat

Geoffrey Manne —  12 January 2012

By Berin Szoka, Geoffrey Manne & Ryan Radia

As has become customary with just about every new product announcement by Google these days, the company’s introduction on Tuesday of its new “Search, plus Your World” (SPYW) program, which aims to incorporate a user’s Google+ content into her organic search results, has met with cries of antitrust foul play. All the usual blustering and speculation in the latest Google antitrust debate has obscured what should, however, be the two key prior questions: (1) Did Google violate the antitrust laws by not including data from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks in its new SPYW program alongside Google+ content; and (2) How might antitrust restrain Google in conditioning participation in this program in the future?

The answer to the first is a clear no. The second is more complicated—but also purely speculative at this point, especially because it’s not even clear Facebook and Twitter really want to be included or what their price and conditions for doing so would be. So in short, it’s hard to see what there is to argue about yet.

Let’s consider both questions in turn.

Should Google Have Included Other Services Prior to SPYW’s Launch?

Google says it’s happy to add non-Google content to SPYW but, as Google fellow Amit Singhal told Danny Sullivan, a leading search engine journalist:

Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service,… Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.

In a follow-up story, Sullivan quotes his interview with Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt about how this would work:

“To start with, we would have a conversation with them,” Schmidt said, about settling any differences.

I replied that with the Google+ suggestions now hitting Google, there was no need to have any discussions or formal deals. Google’s regular crawling, allowed by both Twitter and Facebook, was a form of “automated conversation” giving Google material it could use.

“Anything we do with companies like that, it’s always better to have a conversion,” Schmidt said.

MG Siegler calls this “doublespeak” and seems to think Google violated the antitrust laws by not making SPYW more inclusive right out of the gate. He insists Google didn’t need permission to include public data in SPYW:

Both Twitter and Facebook have data that is available to the public. It’s data that Google crawls. It’s data that Google even has some social context for thanks to older Google Profile features, as Sullivan points out.

It’s not all the data inside the walls of Twitter and Facebook — hence the need for firehose deals. But the data Google can get is more than enough for many of the high level features of Search+ — like the “People and Places” box, for example.

It’s certainly true that if you search Google for “site:twitter.com” or “site:facebook.com,” you’ll get billions of search results from publicly-available Facebook and Twitter pages, and that Google already has some friend connection data via social accounts you might have linked to your Google profile (check out this dashboard), as Sullivan notes. But the public data isn’t available in real-time, and the private, social connection data is limited and available only for users who link their accounts. For Google to access real-time results and full social connection data would require… you guessed it… permission from Twitter (or Facebook)! As it happens, Twitter and Google had a deal for a “data firehose” so that Google could display tweets in real-time under the “personalized search” program for public social information that SPYW builds on top of. But Twitter ended the deal last May for reasons neither company has explained.

At best, therefore, Google might have included public, relatively stale social information from Twitter and Facebook in SPYW—content that is, in any case, already included in basic search results and remains available there. The real question, however, isn’t could Google have included this data in SPYW, but rather need they have? If Google’s engineers and executives decided that the incorporation of this limited data would present an inconsistent user experience or otherwise diminish its uniquely new social search experience, it’s hard to fault the company for deciding to exclude it. Moreover, as an antitrust matter, both the economics and the law of anticompetitive product design are uncertain. In general, as with issues surrounding the vertical integration claims against Google, product design that hurts rivals can (it should be self-evident) be quite beneficial for consumers. Here, it’s difficult to see how the exclusion of non-Google+ social media from SPYW could raise the costs of Google’s rivals, result in anticompetitive foreclosure, retard rivals’ incentives for innovation, or otherwise result in anticompetitive effects (as required to establish an antitrust claim).

Further, it’s easy to see why Google’s lawyers would prefer express permission from competitors before using their content in this way. After all, Google was denounced last year for “scraping” a different type of social content, user reviews, most notably by Yelp’s CEO at the contentious Senate antitrust hearing in September. Perhaps one could distinguish that situation from this one, but it’s not obvious where to draw the line between content Google has a duty to include without “making excuses” about needing permission and content Google has a duty not to include without express permission. Indeed, this seems like a case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” It seems only natural for Google to be gun-shy about “scraping” other services’ public content for use in its latest search innovation without at least first conducting, as Eric Schmidt puts it, a “conversation.”

And as we noted, integrating non-public content would require not just permission but active coordination about implementation. SPYW displays Google+ content only to users who are logged into their Google+ account. Similarly, to display content shared with a user’s friends (but not the world) on Facebook, or protected tweets, Google would need a feed of that private data and a way of logging the user into his or her account on those sites.

Now, if Twitter truly wants Google to feature tweets in Google’s personalized search results, why did Twitter end its agreement with Google last year? Google responded to Twitter’s criticism of its SPYW launch last night with a short Google+ statement:

We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer, and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions [by removing Twitter content results from "personalized search" results].

Perhaps Twitter simply got a better deal: Microsoft may have paid Twitter $30 million last year for a similar deal allowing Bing users to receive Twitter results. If Twitter really is playing hardball, Google is not guilty of discriminating against Facebook and Twitter in favor of its own social platform. Rather, it’s simply unwilling to pony up the cash that Facebook and Twitter are demanding—and there’s nothing illegal about that.

Indeed, the issue may go beyond a simple pricing dispute. If you were CEO of Twitter or Facebook, would you really think it was a net-win if your users could use Google search as an interface for your site? After all, these social networking sites are in an intense war for eyeballs: the more time users spend on Google, the more ads Google can sell, to the detriment of Facebook or Twitter. Facebook probably sees itself increasingly in direct competition with Google as a tool for finding information. Its social network has vastly more users than Google+ (800 million v 62 million, but even larger lead in active users), and, in most respects, more social functionality. The one area where Facebook lags is search functionality. Would Facebook really want to let Google become the tool for searching social networks—one social search engine “to rule them all“? Or would Facebook prefer to continue developing “social search” in partnership with Bing? On Bing, it can control how its content appears—and Facebook sees Microsoft as a partner, not a rival (at least until it can build its own search functionality inside the web’s hottest property).

Adding to this dynamic, and perhaps ultimately fueling some of the fire against SPYW, is the fact that many Google+ users seem to be multi-homing, using both Facebook and Google+ (and other social networks) at the same time, and even using various aggregators and syncing tools (Start Google+, for example) to unify social media streams and share content among them. Before SPYW, this might have seemed like a boon to Facebook, staunching any potential defectors from its network onto Google+ by keeping them engaged with both, with a kind of “Facebook primacy” ensuring continued eyeball time on its site. But Facebook might see SPYW as a threat to this primacy—in effect, reversing users’ primary “home” as they effectively import their Facebook data into SPYW via their Google+ accounts (such as through Start Google+). If SPYW can effectively facilitate indirect Google searching of private Facebook content, the fears we suggest above may be realized, and more users may forego vistiing Facebook.com (and seeing its advertisers), accessing much of their Facebook content elsewhere—where Facebook cannot monetize their attention.

Amidst all the antitrust hand-wringing over SPYW and Google’s decision to “go it alone” for now, it’s worth noting that Facebook has remained silent. Even Twitter has said little more than a tweet’s worth about the issue. It’s simply not clear that Google’s rivals would even want to participate in SPYW. This could still be bad for consumers, but in that case, the source of the harm, if any, wouldn’t be Google. If this all sounds speculative, it is—and that’s precisely the point. No one really knows. So, again, what’s to argue about on Day 3 of the new social search paradigm?

The Debate to Come: Conditioning Access to SPYW

While Twitter and Facebook may well prefer that Google not index their content on SPYW—at least, not unless Google is willing to pay up—suppose the social networking firms took Google up on its offer to have a “conversation” about greater cooperation. Google hasn’t made clear on what terms it would include content from other social media platforms. So it’s at least conceivable that, when pressed to make good on its lofty-but-vague offer to include other platforms, Google might insist on unacceptable terms. In principle, there are essentially three possibilities here:

  1. Antitrust law requires nothing because there are pro-consumer benefits for Google to make SPYW exclusive and no clear harm to competition (as distinct from harm to competitors) for doing so, as our colleague Josh Wright argues.
  2. Antitrust law requires Google to grant competitors access to SPYW on commercially reasonable terms.
  3. Antitrust law requires Google to grant such access on terms dictated by its competitors, even if unreasonable to Google.

Door #3 is a legal non-starter. In Aspen Skiing v. Aspen Highlands (1985), the Supreme Court came the closest it has ever come to endorsing the “essential facilities” doctrine by which a competitor has a duty to offer its facilities to competitors. But in Verizon Communications v. Trinko (2004), the Court made clear that even Aspen Skiing is “at or near the outer boundary of § 2 liability.” Part of the basis for the decision in Aspen Skiing was the existence of a prior, profitable relationship between the “essential facility” in question and the competitor seeking access. Although the assumption is neither warranted nor sufficient (circumstances change, of course, and merely “profitable” is not the same thing as “best available use of a resource”), the Court in Aspen Skiing seems to have been swayed by the view that the access in question was otherwise profitable for the company that was denying it. Trinko limited the reach of the doctrine to the extraordinary circumstances of Aspen Skiing, and thus, as the Court affirmed in Pacific Bell v. LinkLine (2008), it seems there is no antitrust duty for a firm to offer access to a competitor on commercially unreasonable terms (as Geoff Manne discusses at greater length in his chapter on search bias in TechFreedom’s free ebook, The Next Digital Decade).

So Google either has no duty to deal at all, or a duty to deal only on reasonable terms. But what would a competitor have to show to establish such a duty? And how would “reasonableness” be defined?

First, this issue parallels claims made more generally about Google’s supposed “search bias.” As Josh Wright has said about those claims, “[p]roperly articulated vertical foreclosure theories proffer both that bias is (1) sufficient in magnitude to exclude Google’s rivals from achieving efficient scale, and (2) actually directed at Google’s rivals.” Supposing (for the moment) that the second point could be established, it’s hard to see how Facebook or Twitter could really show that being excluded from SPYW—while still having their available content show up as it always has in Google’s “organic” search results—would actually “render their efforts to compete for distribution uneconomical,” which, as Josh explains, antitrust law would require them to show. Google+ is a tiny service compared to Google or Facebook. And even Google itself, for all the awe and loathing it inspires, lags in the critical metric of user engagement, keeping the average user on site for only a quarter as much time as Facebook.

Moreover, by these same measures, it’s clear that Facebook and Twitter don’t need access to Google search results at all, much less its relatively trivial SPYW results, in order find, and be found by, users; it’s difficult to know from what even vaguely relevant market they could possibly be foreclosed by their absence from SPYW results. Does SPYW potentially help Google+, to Facebook’s detriment? Yes. Just as Facebook’s deal with Microsoft hurts Google. But this is called competition. The world would be a desolate place if antitrust laws effectively prohibited firms from making decisions that helped themselves at their competitors’ expense.

After all, no one seems to be suggesting that Microsoft should be forced to include Google+ results in Bing—and rightly so. Microsoft’s exclusive partnership with Facebook is an important example of how a market leader in one area (Facebook in social) can help a market laggard in another (Microsoft in search) compete more effectively with a common rival (Google). In other words, banning exclusive deals can actually make it more difficult to unseat an incumbent (like Google), especially where the technologies involved are constantly evolving, as here.

Antitrust meddling in such arrangements, particularly in high-risk, dynamic markets where large up-front investments are frequently required (and lost), risks deterring innovation and reducing the very dynamism from which consumers reap such incredible rewards. “Reasonable” is a dangerously slippery concept in such markets, and a recipe for costly errors by the courts asked to define the concept. We suspect that disputes arising out of these sorts of deals will largely boil down to skirmishes over pricing, financing and marketing—the essential dilemma of new media services whose business models are as much the object of innovation as their technologies. Turning these, by little more than innuendo, into nefarious anticompetitive schemes is extremely—and unnecessarily—risky. Continue Reading…

In advertising, error costs, essential facilities, exclusionary conduct, google, Internet search, law and economics, monopolization, technology , , , , , ,
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Some Much-Needed Antitrust Skepticism on Senate Letter Urging FTC Google Investigation

Geoffrey Manne —  20 December 2011

By Geoffrey Manne and Berin Szoka

[Cross posted at TechFreedom.org]

Back in September, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee held a hearing on “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?” Given the harsh questioning from the Subcommittee’s Chairman Herb Kohl (D-WI) and Ranking Member Mike Lee (R-UT), no one should have been surprised by the letter they sent yesterday to the Federal Trade Commission asking for a “thorough investigation” of the company. At least this time the danger is somewhat limited: by calling for the FTC to investigate Google, the senators are thus urging the agency to do . . . exactly what it’s already doing.

So one must wonder about the real aim of the letter. Unfortunately, the goal does not appear to be to offer an objective appraisal of the complex issues intended to be addressed at the hearing. That’s disappointing (though hardly surprising) and underscores what we noted at the time of the hearing: There’s something backward about seeing a company hauled before a hostile congressional panel and asked to defend itself, rather than its self-appointed prosecutors being asked to defend their case.

Senators Kohl and Lee insist that they take no position on the legality of Google’s actions, but their lopsided characterization of the issues in the letter—and the fact that the FTC is already doing what they purport to desire as the sole outcome of the letter!—leaves little room for doubt about their aim: to put political pressure on the FTC not merely to investigate, but to reach a particular conclusion and bring a case in court (or simply to ratchet up public pressure from its bully pulpit).

The five page letter concludes with, literally, three sentences presenting Google’s case, one of which reads, in its entirety, “Google strongly denies the arguments of its critics.” The derision is palpable—as if only a craven monopolist would deign to actually deny the iron-clad arguments of Google’s competitors so painstakingly reproduced by Senators Kohl and Lee in the preceding four pages. This is neither rigorous analysis nor objective reporting on the contents of the Senate’s hearing.

While we worry about particularly successful companies being singled out for punishment, we hold no brief for Google in this debate. Instead, in all our writings, we’ve tried to present a consistently skeptical view about a worrisome trend in antitrust enforcement in high tech markets: error-prone and costly intervention in markets that are ill-understood and fast-moving, to the great detriment of consumers and progress generally. Although our institutions have received financial support from Google among a range of other companies, organizations and individuals, our work is focused on this broad mission; we have no obligation or intention to support any company simply because it finds value in supporting our mission.

We’ve defended (and one of us has even worked for) Microsoft in the past, and just yesterday, we lamented the fact that the Obama Justice Department and the FCC have effectively blocked Google’s arch-rival, AT&T, from buying T-Mobile. Rather than defend any particular company, our goal, to paraphrase Hayek, is to “demonstrate to [regulators] how little they really know about what they imagine they can design”—lest they undermine how competition actually works in the name of defending outdated models of how they think it should work. Unfortunately, the letter from Senators Kohl and Lee does nothing to assuage our concern and suggests instead that crass politics, rather than sensible economics, could determine the outcome of cases like this one—if not in a court of law, then in the court of public opinion and extra-legal intimidation.

To begin with, the letter asserts that “Google faces competition from only one general search engine, Bing,” suggesting that only Bing (and it, only ineffectively) could keep Google in check. In essence, the Senators are prejudging an essential question on which any case against Google would turn: market definition. But why would the market not include other tools for information retrieval? Is it not at least worth mentioning that more and more Internet users are finding information and spending time on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, while more and more advertisers are spending their money on these Google competitors? Isn’t it clear that search itself is evolving from “ten blue links” into something more social, multi-faceted and interactive?

In a remarkable leap, the senators then identify the specific alleged abuse that Google’s alleged market power leads to: search bias. That’s remarkable because, other than the breathless claims of disgruntled competitors (given plenty of air time at the September hearing), there is actually no evidence that search bias is, in fact, harmful to consumers—which is what antitrust is concerned with. (Read both sides of this debate in TechFreedom’s free ebook, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet.)

As our colleague, Josh Wright, has thoroughly demonstrated, this “own-content” bias is actually an infrequent phenomenon and is simply not consistent with an actionable claim of anticompetitive foreclosure. Moreover, among search engines, Google references its own content far less frequently than does Bing (which favors Microsoft content in the first search result when no other search engine does so more than twice as often as Google favors its own content).

Of course, none of this is even hinted at in the Senators’ letter, which seems intended to condemn Google for “preferencing” its own content (under the pretense of withholding judgment). It’s a little like condemning Target for deigning to use its trucks to supply inventory only to its own stores instead of Wal-Mart’s, or, say, condemning a congressman for targeting earmarks for his own state or district. Earmark bias! Continue Reading…

In antitrust, error costs, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, google, Internet search, law and economics, markets, monopolization, regulation, technology , , , , , , , , ,
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Is Google Search Bias Consistent with Anticompetitive Foreclosure?

Josh Wright —  9 December 2011

In my series of three posts (here, here and here) drawn from my empirical study on search bias I have examined whether search bias exists, and, if so, how frequently it occurs.  This, the final post in the series, assesses the results of the study (as well as the Edelman & Lockwood (E&L) study to which it responds) to determine whether the own-content bias I’ve identified is in fact consistent with anticompetitive foreclosure or is otherwise sufficient to warrant antitrust intervention.

As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, while I refer to differences among search engines’ rankings of their own or affiliated content as “bias,” without more these differences do not imply anticompetitive conduct.  It is wholly unsurprising and indeed consistent with vigorous competition among engines that differentiation emerges with respect to algorithms.  However, it is especially important to note that the theories of anticompetitive foreclosure raised by Google’s rivals involve very specific claims about these differences.  Properly articulated vertical foreclosure theories proffer both that bias is (1) sufficient in magnitude to exclude Google’s rivals from achieving efficient scale, and (2) actually directed at Google’s rivals.  Unfortunately for search engine critics, their theories fail on both counts.  The observed own-content bias appears neither to be extensive enough to prevent rivals from gaining access to distribution nor does it appear to target Google’s rivals; rather, it seems to be a natural result of intense competition between search engines and of significant benefit to consumers.

Vertical foreclosure arguments are premised upon the notion that rivals are excluded with sufficient frequency and intensity as to render their efforts to compete for distribution uneconomical.  Yet the empirical results simply do not indicate that market conditions are in fact conducive to the types of harmful exclusion contemplated by application of the antitrust laws.  Rather, the evidence indicates that (1) the absolute level of search engine “bias” is extremely low, and (2) “bias” is not a function of market power, but an effective strategy that has arisen as a result of serious competition and innovation between and by search engines.  The first finding undermines competitive foreclosure arguments on their own terms, that is, even if there were no pro-consumer justifications for the integration of Google content with Google search results.  The second finding, even more importantly, reveals that the evolution of consumer preferences for more sophisticated and useful search results has driven rival search engines to satisfy that demand.  Both Bing and Google have shifted toward these results, rendering the complained-of conduct equivalent to satisfying the standard of care in the industry–not restraining competition.

A significant lack of search bias emerges in the representative sample of queries.  This result is entirely unsurprising, given that bias is relatively infrequent even in E&L’s sample of queries specifically designed to identify maximum bias.  In the representative sample, the total percentage of queries for which Google references its own content when rivals do not is even lower—only about 8%—meaning that Google favors its own content far less often than critics have suggested.  This fact is crucial and highly problematic for search engine critics, as their burden in articulating a cognizable antitrust harm includes not only demonstrating that bias exists, but further that it is actually competitively harmful.  As I’ve discussed, bias alone is simply not sufficient to demonstrate any prima facie anticompetitive harm as it is far more often procompetitive or competitively neutral than actively harmful.  Moreover, given that bias occurs in less than 10% of queries run on Google, anticompetitive exclusion arguments appear unsustainable.

Indeed, theories of vertical foreclosure find virtually zero empirical support in the data.  Moreover, it appears that, rather than being a function of monopolistic abuse of power, search bias has emerged as an efficient competitive strategy, allowing search engines to differentiate their products in ways that benefit consumers.  I find that when search engines do reference their own content on their search results pages, it is generally unlikely that another engine will reference this same content.  However, the fact that both this percentage and the absolute level of own content inclusion is similar across engines indicates that this practice is not a function of market power (or its abuse), but is rather an industry standard.  In fact, despite conducting a much smaller percentage of total consumer searches, Bing is consistently more biased than Google, illustrating that the benefits search engines enjoy from integrating their own content into results is not necessarily a function of search engine size or volume of queries.  These results are consistent with a business practice that is efficient and at significant tension with arguments that such integration is designed to facilitate competitive foreclosure. Continue Reading…

In advertising, antitrust, business, economics, exclusionary conduct, google, Internet search, law and economics, monopolization, technology , , , , , , ,
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How Much Search Bias Is There?

Josh Wright —  22 November 2011

My last two posts on search bias (here and here) have analyzed and critiqued Edelman & Lockwood’s small study on search bias.  This post extends this same methodology and analysis to a random sample of 1,000 Google queries (released by AOL in 2006), to develop a more comprehensive understanding of own-content bias.  As I’ve stressed, these analyses provide useful—but importantly limited—glimpses into the nature of the search engine environment.  While these studies are descriptively helpful, actual harm to consumer welfare must always be demonstrated before cognizable antitrust injuries arise.  And naked identifications of own-content bias simply do not inherently translate to negative effects on consumers (see, e.g., here and here for more comprehensive discussion).

Now that’s settled, let’s jump into the results of the 1,000 random search query study.

How Do Search Engines Rank Their Own Content?

Consistent with our earlier analysis, a starting off point for thinking about measuring differentiation among search engines with respect to placing their own content is to compare how a search engine ranks its own content relative to how other engines place that same content (e.g. to compare how Google ranks “Google Maps” relative to how Bing or Blekko rank it).   Restricting attention exclusively to the first or “top” position, I find that Google simply does not refer to its own content in over 90% of queries.  Similarly, Bing does not reference Microsoft content in 85.4% of queries.  Google refers to its own content in the first position when other search engines do not in only 6.7% of queries; while Bing does so over twice as often, referencing Microsoft content that no other engine references in the first position in 14.3% of queries.  The following two charts illustrate the percentage of Google or Bing first position results, respectively, dedicated to own content across search engines.

The most striking aspect of these results is the small fraction of queries for which placement of own-content is relevant.  The results are similar when I expand consideration to the entire first page of results; interestingly, however, while the levels of own-content bias are similar considering the entire first page of results, Bing is far more likely than Google to reference its own content in its very first results position.

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Google

Two distinct differences between the results of this larger study and my replication of Edelman & Lockwood emerge: (1) Google and Bing refer to their own content in a significantly smaller percentage of cases here than in the non-random sample; and (2) in general, when Google or Bing does rank its own content highly, rival engines are unlikely to similarly rank that same content.

The following table reports the percentages of queries for which Google’s ranking of its own content and its rivals’ rankings of that same content differ significantly. When Google refers to its own content within its Top 5 results, at least one other engine similarly ranks this content for only about 5% of queries.

The following table presents the likelihood that Google content will appear in a Google search, relative to searches conducted on rival engines (reported in odds ratios).

The first and third columns report results indicating that Google affiliated content is more likely to appear in a search executed on Google rather than rival engines.  Google is approximately 16 times more likely to refer to its own content on its first page as is any other engine.  Bing and Blekko are both significantly less likely to refer to Google content in their first result or on their first page than Google is to refer to Google content within these same parameters.  In each iteration, Bing is more likely to refer to Google content than is Blekko, and in the case of the first result, Bing is much more likely to do so.  Again, to be clear, the fact that Bing is more likely to rank its own content is not suggestive that the practice is problematic.  Quite the contrary, the demonstration that firms both with and without market power in search (to the extent that is a relevant antitrust market) engage in similar conduct the correct inference is that there must be efficiency explanations for the practice.  The standard response, of course, is that the competitive implications of a practice are different when a firm with market power does it.  That’s not exactly right.  It is true that firms with market power can engage in conduct that gives rise to potential antitrust problems when the same conduct from a firm without market power would not; however, when firms without market power engage in the same business practice it demands that antitrust analysts seriously consider the efficiency implications of the practice.  In other words, there is nothing in the mantra that things are “different” when larger firms do them that undercut potential efficiency explanations.

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Bing

For queries within the larger sample, Bing refers to Microsoft content within its Top 1 and 3 results when no other engine similarly references this content for a slightly smaller percentage of queries than in my Edelman & Lockwood replication.  Yet Bing continues to exhibit a strong tendency to rank Microsoft content more prominently than rival engines.  For example, when Bing refers to Microsoft content within its Top 5 results, other engines agree with this ranking for less than 2% of queries; and Bing refers to Microsoft content that no other engine does within its Top 3 results for 99.2% of queries:

Regression analysis further illustrates Bing’s propensity to reference Microsoft content that rivals do not.  The following table reports the likelihood that Microsoft content is referred to in a Bing search as compared to searches on rival engines (again reported in odds ratios).

Bing refers to Microsoft content in its first results position about 56 times more often than rival engines refer to Microsoft content in this same position.  Across the entire first page, Microsoft content appears on a Bing search about 25 times more often than it does on any other engine.  Both Google and Blekko are accordingly significantly less likely to reference Microsoft content.  Notice further that, contrary to the findings in the smaller study, Google is slightly less likely to return Microsoft content than is Blekko, both in its first results position and across its entire first page.

A Closer Look at Google v. Bing

 Consistent with the smaller sample, I find again that Bing is more biased than Google using these metrics.  In other words, Bing ranks its own content significantly more highly than its rivals do more frequently then Google does, although the discrepancy between the two engines is smaller here than in the study of Edelman & Lockwood’s queries.  As noted above, Bing is over twice as likely to refer to own content in first results position than is Google.

Figures 7 and 8 present the same data reported above, but with Blekko removed, to allow for a direct visual comparison of own-content bias between Google and Bing.

Consistent with my earlier results, Bing appears to consistently rank Microsoft content higher than Google ranks the same (Microsoft) content more frequently than Google ranks Google content more prominently than Bing ranks the same (Google) content.

This result is particularly interesting given the strength of the accusations condemning Google for behaving in precisely this way.  That Bing references Microsoft content just as often as—and frequently even more often than!—Google references its own content strongly suggests that this behavior is a function of procompetitive product differentiation, and not abuse of market power.  But I’ll save an in-depth analysis of this issue for my next post, where I’ll also discuss whether any of the results reported in this series of posts support anticompetitive foreclosure theories or otherwise suggest antitrust intervention is warranted.

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Extending & Rebutting Edelman & Lockwood on Search Bias

Josh Wright —  9 November 2011

In my last post, I discussed Edelman & Lockwood’s (E&L’s) attempt to catch search engines in the act of biasing their results—as well as their failure to actually do so.  In this post, I present my own results from replicating their study.  Unlike E&L, I find that Bing is consistently more biased than Google, for reasons discussed further below, although neither engine references its own content as frequently as E&L suggest.

I ran searches for E&L’s original 32 non-random queries using three different search engines—Google, Bing, and Blekko—between June 23 and July 5 of this year.  This replication is useful, as search technology has changed dramatically since E&L recorded their results in August 2010.  Bing now powers Yahoo, and Blekko has had more time to mature and enhance its results.  Blekko serves as a helpful “control” engine in my study, as it is totally independent of Google and Microsoft, and so has no incentive to refer to Google or Microsoft content unless it is actually relevant to users.  In addition, because Blekko’s model is significantly different than Google and Microsoft’s, if results on all three engines agree that specific content is highly relevant to the user query, it lends significant credibility to the notion that the content places well on the merits rather than being attributable to bias or other factors.

How Do Search Engines Rank Their Own Content?

Focusing solely upon the first position, Google refers to its own products or services when no other search engine does in 21.9% of queries; in another 21.9% of queries, both Google and at least one other search engine rival (i.e. Bing or Blekko) refer to the same Google content with their first links.

But restricting focus upon the first position is too narrow.  Assuming that all instances in which Google or Bing rank their own content first and rivals do not amounts to bias would be a mistake; such a restrictive definition would include cases in which all three search engines rank the same content prominently—agreeing that it is highly relevant—although not all in the first position. 

The entire first page of results provides a more informative comparison.  I find that Google and at least one other engine return Google content on the first page of results in 7% of the queries.  Google refers to its own content on the first page of results without agreement from either rival search engine in only 7.9% of the queries.  Meanwhile, Bing and at least one other engine refer to Microsoft content in 3.2% of the queries.  Bing references Microsoft content without agreement from either Google or Blekko in 13.2% of the queries:

This evidence indicates that Google’s ranking of its own content differs significantly from its rivals in only 7.9% of queries, and that when Google ranks its own content prominently it is generally perceived as relevant.  Further, these results suggest that Bing’s organic search results are significantly more biased in favor of Microsoft content than Google’s search results are in favor of Google’s content.

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Google

The following table presents the percentages of queries for which Google’s ranking of its own content differs significantly from its rivals’ ranking of that same content.

Note that percentages below 50 in this table indicate that rival search engines generally see the referenced Google content as relevant and independently believe that it should be ranked similarly.

So when Google ranks its own content highly, at least one rival engine typically agrees with this ranking; for example, when Google places its own content in its Top 3 results, at least one rival agrees with this ranking in over 70% of queries.  Bing especially agrees with Google’s rankings of Google content within its Top 3 and 5 results, failing to include Google content that Google ranks similarly in only a little more than a third of queries.

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Bing

Bing refers to Microsoft content in its search results far more frequently than its rivals reference the same Microsoft content.  For example, Bing’s top result references Microsoft content for 5 queries, while neither Google nor Blekko ever rank Microsoft content in the first position:

This table illustrates the significant discrepancies between Bing’s treatment of its own Microsoft content relative to Google and Blekko.  Neither rival engine refers to Microsoft content Bing ranks within its Top 3 results; Google and Blekko do not include any Microsoft content Bing refers to on the first page of results in nearly 80% of queries.

Moreover, Bing frequently ranks Microsoft content highly even when rival engines do not refer to the same content at all in the first page of results.  For example, of the 5 queries for which Bing ranks Microsoft content in its top result, Google refers to only one of these 5 within its first page of results, while Blekko refers to none.  Even when comparing results across each engine’s full page of results, Google and Blekko only agree with Bing’s referral of Microsoft content in 20.4% of queries.

Although there are not enough Bing data to test results in the first position in E&L’s sample, Microsoft content appears as results on the first page of a Bing search about 7 times more often than Microsoft content appears on the first page of rival engines.  Also, Google is much more likely to refer to Microsoft content than Blekko, though both refer to significantly less Microsoft content than Bing.

A Closer Look at Google v. Bing

On E&L’s own terms, Bing results are more biased than Google results; rivals are more likely to agree with Google’s algorithmic assessment (than with Bing’s) that its own content is relevant to user queries.  Bing refers to Microsoft content other engines do not rank at all more often than Google refers its own content without any agreement from rivals.  Figures 1 and 2 display the same data presented above in order to facilitate direct comparisons between Google and Bing.

As Figures 1 and 2 illustrate, Bing search results for these 32 queries are more frequently “biased” in favor of its own content than are Google’s.  The bias is greatest for the Top 1 and Top 3 search results.

My study finds that Bing exhibits far more “bias” than E&L identify in their earlier analysis.  For example, in E&L’s study, Bing does not refer to Microsoft content at all in its Top 1 or Top 3 results; moreover, Bing refers to Microsoft content within its entire first page 11 times, while Google and Yahoo refer to Microsoft content 8 and 9 times, respectively.  Most likely, the significant increase in Bing’s “bias” differential is largely a function of Bing’s introduction of localized and personalized search results and represents serious competitive efforts on Bing’s behalf.

Again, it’s important to stress E&L’s limited and non-random sample, and to emphasize the danger of making strong inferences about the general nature or magnitude of search bias based upon these data alone.  However, the data indicate that Google’s own-content bias is relatively small even in a sample collected precisely to focus upon the queries most likely to generate it.  In fact—as I’ll discuss in my next post—own-content bias occurs even less often in a more representative sample of queries, strongly suggesting that such bias does not raise the competitive concerns attributed to it.

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Investigating Search Bias: Measuring Edelman & Lockwood’s Failure to Measure Bias in Search

Josh Wright —  8 November 2011

Last week I linked to my new study on “search bias.”  At the time I noted I would have a few blog posts in the coming days discussing the study.  This is the first of those posts.

A lot of the frenzy around Google turns on “search bias,” that is, instances when Google references its own links or its own content (such as Google Maps or YouTube) in its search results pages.  Some search engine critics condemn such references as inherently suspect and almost by their very nature harmful to consumers.  Yet these allegations suffer from several crucial shortcomings.  As I’ve noted (see, e.g., here and here), these naked assertions of discrimination are insufficient to state a cognizable antitrust claim, divorced as they are from consumer welfare analysis.  Indeed, such “discrimination” (some would call it “vertical integration”) has a well-recognized propensity to yield either pro-competitive or competitively neutral outcomes, rather than concrete consumer welfare losses.  Moreover, because search engines exist in an incredibly dynamic environment, marked by constant innovation and fierce competition, we would expect different engines, utilizing different algorithms and appealing to different consumer preferences, to emerge.  So when search engines engage in product differentiation of this sort, there is no reason to be immediately suspicious of these business decisions.

No reason to be immediately suspicious – but there could, conceivably, be a problem.  If there is, we would want to see empirical evidence of it—of both the existence of bias, as well as the consumer harm emanating from it.  But one of the most notable features of this debate is the striking lack of empirical data.  Surprisingly little research has been done in this area, despite frequent assertions that own-content bias is commonly practiced and poses a significant threat to consumers (see, e.g., here).

My paper is an attempt to rectify this.  In the paper, I investigate the available data to determine whether and to what extent own-content bias actually occurs, by analyzing and replicating a study by Ben Edelman and Ben Lockwood (E&L) and conducting my own study of a larger, randomized set of search queries.

In this post I discuss my analysis and critique of E&L; in future posts I’ll present my own replication of their study, as well as the results of my larger study of 1,000 random search queries.  Finally, I’ll analyze whether any of these findings support anticompetitive foreclosure theories or are otherwise sufficient to warrant antitrust intervention.

E&L “investigate . . . [w]hether search engines’ algorithmic results favor their own services, and if so, which search engines do most, to what extent, and in what substantive areas.”  Their approach is to measure the difference in how frequently search engines refer to their own content relative to how often their rivals do so.

One note at the outset:  While this approach provides useful descriptive facts about the differences between how search engines link to their own content, it does little to inform antitrust analysis because Edelman and Lockwood begin with the rather odd claim that competition among differentiated search engines for consumers is a puzzle that creates an air of suspicion around the practice—in fact, they claim that “it is hard to see why results would vary . . . across search engines.”  This assertion, of course, is simply absurd.  Indeed, Danny Sullivan provides a nice critique of this claim:

It’s not hard to see why search engine result differ at all.  Search engines each use their own “algorithm” to cull through the pages they’ve collected from across the web, to decide which pages to rank first . . . . Google has a different algorithm than Bing.  In short, Google will have a different opinion than Bing.  Opinions in the search world, as with the real world, don’t always agree.

Moreover, this assertion completely discounts both the vigorous competitive product differentiation that occurs in nearly all modern product markets as well as the obvious selection effects at work in own-content bias (Google users likely prefer Google content).  This combination detaches E&L’s analysis from the consumer welfare perspective, and thus antitrust policy relevance, despite their claims to the contrary (and the fact that their results actually exhibit very little bias).

Several methodological issues undermine the policy relevance of E&L’s analysis.  First, they hand select 32 search queries and execute searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.  This hand-selected non-random sample of 32 search queries cannot generate reliable inferences regarding the frequency of bias—a critical ingredient to understanding its potential competitive effects.  Indeed, E&L acknowledge their queries are chosen precisely because they are likely to return results including Google content (e.g., email, images, maps, video, etc.).

E&L analyze the top three organic search results for each query on each engine.  They find that 19% of all results across all five search engines refer to content affiliated with one of them.  They focus upon the first three organic results and report that Google refers to its own content in the first (“top”) position about twice as often as Yahoo and Bing refer to Google content in this position.  Additionally, they note that Yahoo is more biased than Google when evaluating the first page rather than only the first organic search result.

E&L also offer a strained attempt to deal with the possibility of competitive product differentiation among search engines.  They examine differences among search engines’ references to their own content by “compar[ing] the frequency with which a search engine links to its own pages, relative to the frequency with which other search engines link to that search engine’s pages.”  However, their evidence undermines claims that Google’s own-content bias is significant and systematic relative to its rivals’.  In fact, almost zero evidence of statistically significant own-content bias by Google emerges.

E&L find, in general, Google is no more likely to refer to its own content than other search engines are to refer to that same content, and across the vast majority of their results, E&L find Google search results are not statistically more likely to refer to Google content than rivals’ search results.

The same data can be examined to test the likelihood that a search engine will refer to content affiliated with a rival search engine.  Rather than exhibiting bias in favor of an engine’s own content, a “biased” search engine might conceivably be less likely to refer to content affiliated with its rivals.  The table below reports the likelihood (in odds ratios) that a search engine’s content appears in a rival engine’s results.

The first two columns of the table demonstrate that both Google and Yahoo content are referred to in the first search result less frequently in rivals’ search results than in their own.  Although Bing does not have enough data for robust analysis of results in the first position in E&L’s original analysis, the next three columns in Table 1 illustrate that all three engines’ (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) content appears less often on the first page of rivals’ search results than on their own search engine.  However, only Yahoo’s results differ significantly from 1.  As between Google and Bing, the results are notably similar.

E&L also make a limited attempt to consider the possibility that favorable placement of a search engine’s own content is a response to user preferences rather than anticompetitive motives.  Using click-through data, they find, unsurprisingly, that the first search result tends to receive the most clicks (72%, on average).  They then identify one search term for which they believe bias plays an important role in driving user traffic.  For the search query “email,” Google ranks its own Gmail first and Yahoo Mail second; however, E&L also find that Gmail receives only 29% of clicks while Yahoo Mail receives 54%.  E&L claim that this finding strongly indicates that Google is engaging in conduct that harms users and undermines their search experience.

However, from a competition analysis perspective, that inference is not sound.  Indeed, the fact that the second-listed Yahoo Mail link received the majority of clicks demonstrates precisely that Yahoo was not competitively foreclosed from access to users.  Taken collectively, E&L are not able to muster evidence of potential competitive foreclosure.

While it’s important to have an evidence-based discussion surrounding search engine results and their competitive implications, it’s also critical to recognize that bias alone is not evidence of competitive harm.  Indeed, any identified bias must be evaluated in the appropriate antitrust economic context of competition and consumers, rather than individual competitors and websites.  E&L’s analysis provides a useful starting point for describing how search engines differ in their referrals to their own content.  But, taken at face value, their results actually demonstrate little or no evidence of bias—let alone that the little bias they do find is causing any consumer harm.

As I’ll discuss in coming posts, evidence gathered since E&L conducted their study further suggests their claims that bias is prevalent, inherently harmful, and sufficient to warrant antitrust intervention are overstated and misguided.

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My New Empirical Study on Defining and Measuring Search Bias

Josh Wright —  3 November 2011

Tomorrow is the deadline for Eric Schmidt to send his replies to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s follow up questions from his appearance at a hearing on Google antitrust issues last month.  At the hearing, not surprisingly, search neutrality was a hot topic, with representatives from the likes of Yelp and Nextag, as well as Expedia’s lawyer, Tom Barnett (that’s Tom Barnett (2011), not Tom Barnett (2006-08)), weighing in on Google’s purported bias.  One serious problem with the search neutrality/search bias discussions to date has been the dearth of empirical evidence concerning so-called search bias and its likely impact upon consumers.  Hoping to remedy this, I posted a study this morning at the ICLE website both critiquing one of the few, existing pieces of empirical work on the topic (by Ben Edelman, Harvard economist) as well as offering up my own, more expansive empirical analysis.  Chris Sherman at Search Engine Land has a great post covering the study.  The title of his article pretty much says it all:  “Bing More Biased Than Google; Google Not Behaving Anti-competitively.” Continue Reading…

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ABA Roundtable Discussion Tomorrow on the AT&T/T-Mobile Merger

Geoffrey Manne —  26 September 2011

As I have posted before, I was disappointed that the DOJ filed against AT&T in its bid to acquire T-Mobile.  The efficacious provision of mobile broadband service is a complicated business, but it has become even more so by government’s meddling.  Responses like this merger are both inevitable and essential.  And Sprint and Cellular South piling on doesn’t help — and, as Josh has pointed out, further suggests that the merger is actually pro-competitive.

Tomorrow, along with a great group of antitrust attorneys, I am going to pick up where I left off in that post during a roundtable discussion hosted by the American Bar Association.  If you are in the DC area you should attend in person, or you can call in to listen to the discussion–but either way, you will need to register here.  There should be a couple of people live tweeting the event, so keep up with the conversation by following #ABASAL.

Panelists:
Richard Brunell, Director of Legal Advocacy, American Antitrust Institute, Boston
Allen Grunes, Partner, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, Washington
Glenn Manishin, Partner, Duane Morris LLP, Washington
Geoffrey Manne, Lecturer in Law, Lewis & Clark Law School, Portland
Patrick Pascarella, Partner, Tucker Ellis & West, Cleveland

Location: 
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C. 1700 K St. N.W. Fifth Floor Washington, D.C. 20006

For more information, check out the flyer here.

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FairSearch’s Non-Sequitur Response

Geoffrey Manne & Joshua Wright —  19 July 2011

Our search neutrality paper has received some recent attention.  While the initial response from Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal was favorable, critics are now voicing their responses.  Although we appreciate FairSearch’s attempt to engage with our paper’s central claims, its response is really little more than an extended non-sequitur and fails to contribute to the debate meaningfully.

Unfortunately, FairSearch grossly misstates our arguments and, in the process, basic principles of antitrust law and economics.  Accordingly, we offer a brief reply to correct a few of the most critical flaws, point out several quotes in our paper that FairSearch must have overlooked when they were characterizing our argument, and set straight FairSearch’s various economic and legal misunderstandings.

We want to begin by restating the simple claims that our paper does—and does not—make.

Our fundamental argument is that claims that search discrimination is anticompetitive are properly treated skeptically because:  (1) discrimination (that is, presenting or ranking a search engine’s own or affiliated content more prevalently than its rivals’ in response to search queries) arises from vertical integration in the search engine market (i.e., Google responds to a query by providing not only “10 blue links” but also perhaps a map or video created Google or previously organized on a Google-affiliated site (YouTube, e.g.)); (2) both economic theory and evidence demonstrate that such integration is generally pro-competitive; and (3) in Google’s particular market, evidence of intense competition and constant innovation abounds, while evidence of harm to consumers is entirely absent.  In other words, it is much more likely than not that search discrimination is pro-competitive rather than anticompetitive, and doctrinal error cost concerns accordingly counsel great hesitation in any antitrust intervention, administrative or judicial.  As we will discuss, these are claims that FairSearch’s lawyers are quite familiar with.

FairSearch, however, grossly mischaracterizes these basic points, asserting instead that we claim

 “that even if Google does [manipulate its search results], this should be immune from antitrust enforcement due to the difficulty of identifying ‘bias’ and the risks of regulating benign conduct.”

This statement is either intentionally deceptive or betrays a shocking misunderstanding of our central claim for at least two reasons: (1) we never advocate for complete antitrust immunity, and (2) it trivializes the very real—and universally-accepted–difficulty of distinguishing between pro- and anticompetitive conduct.

First, we acknowledge the obvious point that as a theoretical matter discrimination can amount to an antitrust violation in some cases under certain specific circumstances—not the least important of which is proof of actual competitive harm.  To quote ourselves:

The key question is whether such a bias benefits consumers or inflicts competitive harm.  Economic theory has long understood the competitive benefits of such vertical integration; modern economic theory also teaches that, under some conditions, vertical integration and contractual arrangements can create a potential for competitive harm that must be weighed against those benefits . . . .  From a policy perspective, the issue is whether some sort of ex ante blanket prohibition or restriction on vertical integration is appropriate instead of an ex post, fact-intensive evaluation on a case-by-case basis, such as under antitrust law. (Manne and Wright, 2011) (emphasis added).

This is not much of a concession.  While FairSearch tries to move the goalposts by focusing on a straw man proposition that search bias is categorically immune from antitrust scrutiny, this sleight of hand doesn’t accomplish much and reveals what FairSearch is missing.   After all, consider that almost every single form of business conduct can be an antitrust violation under some set of conditions!  The antitrust laws apply in principle to (that is, do not categorically make immune) horizontal mergers, vertical mergers, long-term contracts, short-term contracts, exclusive dealing, partial exclusive dealing, burning down a rival’s factory, dealing with rivals, refusing to dealing with rivals, boycotts, tying contracts, overlapping boards, and all manner of pricing practices.  Indeed, it is hard to find categories of business conduct that are outright immune from the antitrust laws.  So—we agree:  “Search bias” can conceivably be anticompetitive.  Unfortunately for FairSearch, we never said otherwise and it’s not a very interesting point to discuss.

With that point firmly established, one can return focus to the topic FairSearch painstakingly avoids throughout its response and on which we think the issue really does (and should) turn: Where’s the proof of consumer harm?

Continue Reading…

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