In the last days, there was a lot of media coverage on the the antitrust investigation by the FTC against Google. In my opinion, this investigation is ridiculous. Let me explain why:

The Facts From an FTC Point of view

• Google is the leading search engine on the net.
• Companies and the FTC seem to believe that there is a bias. Google seem to display their own products in the search results more frequently than similar content from competitors (e.g. Maps vs. Yelp or Youtube vs. Vimeo).
• The combination is considered to an abuse of Google’s market share in search.

Google’s Reaction

You can read the official answer to these accusations on the Google blog. They don’t start a discussion about it but basically state their noble goals and achievements:

• Google supports open standards and open source
• Google does not try to lock the users in. Instead, contrary to most companies on the web, they have the data liberation front to give users the chance to escape from Google products and take their data with them.
• Competition on the web is hard and the alternatives are only one click away
• They believe in “user first” and create search in a way that satisfies the user
• Using Google is a choice. If they don’t put their users first, they will lose them.

You can find more detailed information on Google’s perspective here.

My Opinion.

1. First of all, Google products like Youtube belong to the most relevant products on the web. I am pretty sure an algorithm without any bias would rank resources from Youtube first and videos from other websites second.
2. Additionally, since search for rich media content like videos is much harder than text retrievel, it makes sense to use all the information you have for solving issues regarding information retrieval. So it is obvious that finding the relevant videos from Youtube is much easier for Google than finding the most relevant videos from other websites.
3. Google is a service offering a direction to their customers. These directions come fast and in outstanding quality. That is why Google became a world wide market leader in search. If their search results were biased and they would put their own products to the user, they would take a huge risk. If the user didn’t like the search result, they would quickly lose him as a customer.
4. Assume the accusation is true. It is still Google’s good right to do that. Web search is a very hard problem. Google is a normal enterprise. There is no law that web search has to be the most objective search that is possible. Especially since there is no universal truth or ranking to compare with anyway.

The internet is one of the hardest markets to compete in. If you change your product for the worse, the alternative is indeed only one click away. Therefor, antitrust investigations on the internet make almost no sense. By creating an extraordinary product, focusing on users needs and having high ideals, Google was able not only to remain successful over a decade, but also to continue growing. This would be impossible with a dishonest product on the web. So dear FTC, before chasing Google with antitrust investigations, I suggest to chase some other companies.
Yahoo: Look at their portal. Yahoo was the leading search engine before Google was launched. After a while, they started pushing a lot of additional products on their users. Many of them are still out there and produce good revenue streams for Yahoo. (Editorial News, Mail, …)
Facebook: They mislead everyone who has a fan page by not communicating clearly that having a thousand fans does not really offer the opportunity to communicate with all of them or their friends. Also, look a the Open Graph API. This API is everything but open. This name is one of the most misleading marketing devices I have seen in my life.
Microsoft: Internet explorer is still one of the most widely used browsers in the world. Talk to any technically savvy person and you will realize that this is not about a good product but rather because Microsoft abused their reach. By the way, in Google Chrome’s search box, you can choose right away which search engine should be your default. They don’t force you to use Google.
Facebook / Microsoft + Bing: If you find a person by searching for them on Bing and that person happens to be on Facebook, Bing offers you the option to send them a message directly without opening Facebook. Look at this video and decide for yourself. Remember Microsoft invested 240 $ to buy 1.6% of Facebook shares.

Apple: The popularity of the iPod allowed them to create the iPhone, a product locking in people. You cannot use certain standard products and software on it because Apple doesn’t want to pay the licence fee. You get locked in iTunes. There is almost no way to export your music out of iTunes to other systems or devices.
Ebay / Paypal: Well yes, Paypal solved problems. But was it neccesary to market it this aggressively on ebay?
Disclaimer: For all the companies and products I mentioned – except Facebook – I still think it is their right to do what I stated here. To quote a famous man: “It’s ok. Let the market decide. It is called competition.” (Eric Schmidt)
offtopic: I talked about how Google is not locking in users. Ther is a funny video from the onion network about this topic which I want to share with you: