\t\t\t\tI don’t have time to carry on at length about today’s Senate hearing on the Google-Yahoo search ads price-fixing deal, so here are a couple of pieces written before the hearing that put in its proper perspective. <\/p>\n
For your cocktail, try a bit of Information Week<\/a>, a straight-up tongue loosener.<\/p>\n For your appetizer, enjoy Washington insider and tech buff Declan McCullagh<\/a> on the revolving arguments:<\/p>\n \nThe U.S. Senate is holding a hearing Tuesday on the antitrust implications of the Google-Yahoo ad deal, and the two companies, along with Microsoft, are testifying. You should expect sober, selfless discussions conducted with the public’s best interests in mind.<\/p>\n Or not. In reality, Microsoft will offer fanciful claims about the alleged detrimental impact of a Google-Yahoo partnership, just as Google offered fanciful claims a few months ago about the alleged detrimental impact of a Microsoft-Yahoo combination. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n And for your main course, read Scott Cleland on the importance of advertising earnestly<\/a>:<\/p>\n This is now a broad antitrust investigation of whether:<\/p>\n * Google and Yahoo are illegally colluding to reduce competition and\/or fix prices; And for desert, enjoy Andrew Orlowski’s incredibly insightful analysis of the importance of search ad competition for the future of the Internet economy:<\/p>\n Google: the mother of antitrust battles? | The Register<\/a><\/p>\n So Google has been readying itself for regulatory intervention for several years. It lobbies extensively, and thanks to its reach-out program to politicians and wonks, now owns a fair chunk of mindshare among the political elites. With its private “Zeitgeist” conference – an annual orgy of self-glorification – it reaches over the heads of representatives and and hacks to the political leaders and media owners themselves. In the UK, there’s a revolving door between the two major parties and Google.<\/p>\n Politicians can sprinkle a little of the future on themselves just by rubbing up against the web giant.<\/p>\n As Microsoft discovered, fortuitously, this is money well-spent. A sympathetic Bush administration dissolved the DoJ’s will to impose tough penalties against Microsoft more effectively than any lawyer or economist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And finally, have some nuts with your brandy in the form of the testimony submitted to the hearing,<\/a> which is just as Declan said it would be.<\/p>\n After I’ve seen the video of the hearing, I’ll have something else to say.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t have time to carry on at length about today’s Senate hearing on the Google-Yahoo search ads price-fixing deal, so here are a couple of pieces written before the hearing that put in its proper perspective. For your cocktail, try a bit of Information Week, a straight-up tongue loosener. For your appetizer, enjoy Washington … Continue reading “Commentary on today’s Senate Anti-Trust Hearing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,38,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-net-neutrality","category-web"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-19Y","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n * Google is more broadly abusing its market power illegally to impede competition from its #2 and #3 search advertising competitors Yahoo and Microsoft; and
\n * Google is abusing its market power in a myriad of ways, for example, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153raising the minimum bids on keywords swiftly and steeply.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n