antitrust

Transactions should be legally treated similarly according to legal precedent – basic fairness.

What’s quintessential illegal monopoly behavior?

The facts and analysis that follows will show why it is quite clear that the reviewing antitrust authority will want to be thorough and not cursory in its formal review of this Amazon-WholeFoods transaction.

The expected guilty EU antitrust verdict against Alphabet-Google’s flagship “general search service” for abusing its dominance, will be a tipping point for Alphabet-Google this summer.

What did the Senate confirmation hearing for President Trump’s nominee to head up the DOJ Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim, tell us that’s relevant to the biggest pending global antitrust issue — Google? A lot.

Most of what we have learned in the five months since the election indicates that the Trump Administration is not going to be Google’s antitrust advocate and protector like the Obama Administration effectively was from 2013-2016.

The evidence is overwhelming that Alphabet-Google has broadly extended its search and search monopolies into several more markets, and that it has done so anti-competitively in the four years since the FTC chaotically shut down its search, search advertising, and Android investigations in January 2013.

Google’s Take Action page explains net neutrality: “The Internet should be competitive and open. … It’s a level playing field, where new entrants and established players can reach users on an equal footing. If Internet access providers can block some services and cut special deals that prioritize some companies’ content over others that would threaten the innovation that makes the Internet awesome.”

Few outside of Alphabet-Google understand the immense market, economic, and technological power of an unaccountable monopoly over the underlying software that controls most all mobile devices in the world. Fortunately EU antitrust enforcers are some of the few who understand it.

In the next several weeks, expect the EC’s Competition Directorate to decide that Google is in fact dominant with >90% share of Internet search in Europe and that Google has abused its search dominance by biasing its own Shopping service over competitors. It also could formally charge Google for abuse of its search dominance in contractually tying Google Search and other search-driven apps like Maps, YouTube, etc. to Android to extend its search dominance to mobile search and to the operating system market where Android now owns >80% share.

There are troubling signals that the FCC is gearing up to further increase regulation of cable — on top of the extra-legal new utility regulation the FCC already did in its 2015 Open Internet Order.

What we have learned in the last two months is that Google is much more worried than it says about the risks it faces from a variety of real structural changes it may have to make in its core business overseas in the months and years ahead — where the vast majority of Google’s users are, and from where over 50% of its revenues come.

Gconomy, Gclipse, Gvolution, Gvil, Goobris and other Google antitrust-relevant words join over 1700 new words and definitions added to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary in 2015, available now in print and online at Merriam-Webster.com. These new additions to America’s best-selling dictionary reflect the growing influence Google is having on human endeavor.