Google: What Excessive Concentration of Market Power?
So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”
Google (GOOG) Chief Legal Officer David Drummond says the company’s proposed search advertising partnership with Yahoo “will not increase Google’s share of search traffic” (Talking points here). But no one appears to be taking him at his word. The evidence: A dozen or so states worried about the excessive concentration of market power the deal would create have opened antitrust investigations into it. And according to MarketWatch, several have begun issuing subpoenas.
Seems that just as Microsoft’s (MSFT) hostile bid for Yahoo (YHOO) raises troubling questions about openness and innovation, so too does the Google-Yahoo ad deal. Funny how well that shoe fits on the other foot.
