AllThingsD » Senate Antitrust Subcommittee

Schmidt: Google Dominant? Heck, We're Just One Slip Away From Oblivion!

John Paczkowski — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:41:01 +0000

Google may be the largest provider of search services around and a sprawling Internet giant, but it’s also a company fighting for its very survival in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Remarkably, that was the gist of Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s testimony before a Senate antitrust subcommittee today.

“Consumers have a truly vast array of options -– some search and some not -– from which to access information,” Schmidt told regulators, citing Amazon, Facebook and Bing — “which some commentators have speculated … could overtake Google as early as 2012” — among other examples. “And most importantly, all of these options for obtaining information can be accessed without ever using Google. … Google’s success despite strong competition is based on its persistent focus on satisfying consumers –- getting them to the answers they want quickly and accurately. Keeping up requires constant investment and innovation, and if Google fails in this effort users can and will switch. The cost of going elsewhere is zero, and users can and do use other sources to find the information they want.”

In other words, Google’s business is perpetually at risk and its dominance potentially fleeting. An interesting slice of humble pie for a company with a full two-thirds of the U.S. search market to be serving up to the committee. Does Google really expect it to buy the pitch that it’s not all that important or powerful in the industry?

Will Schmidt Show Restraint at Senate Hearing -- Or Will He Need One?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 20:06:01 +0000

Steve Martin once said, “Some people have a way with words. Other people … not have way.” Former Google CEO and current Chairman Eric Schmidt falls squarely in the latter category.

In appearance after appearance, the gaffe-prone Schmidt has made one tactless remark after another — often on sensitive or controversial topics. So when he appears before a Senate antitrust subcommittee hearing this Wednesday to testify about the company’s dominance of Internet search, he had best choose his words carefully.

Because there’s a lot more at stake here than Google’s public image, which Schmidt has done as much as anyone to tarnish. And Senate subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl, D-Wis., and his colleagues likely have an even lower tolerance for Schmidt’s freaky, power-tripping pronouncements than most.

But can Schmidt restrain himself from making them? Given his record to date, that seems unlikely. In the past year alone he’s made a string of verbal gaffes for which he and Google have taken quite a beating in the media.

Speaking about Google’s social media efforts and its growing rivalry with Facebook at the company’s Zeitgeist conference last September, Schmidt ominously said, “The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information.”

That same month, he told the Atlantic, “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

Defending Google’s Street View service on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” program in October, Schmidt said that people who don’t like Street View cars taking pictures of their homes and businesses “can just move” afterward to protect their privacy. Ironically, Schmidt said this on the very day that Google conceded that those cars did collect more than just fragments of personal payload data.

And then there was the now-infamous “creepy line” comment: “There is what I call the creepy line. The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Schmidt’s personal policy, evidently, is the exact opposite.

These are just a few examples; there are plenty of others here, and they’re worth reading because Schmidt really does have a penchant for controversial statements. His testimony Wednesday will likely be as pivotal a moment for Google as then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates’s was in the company’s 1998 antitrust trial. Will it be equally embarrassing?

PREVIOUSLY:

Talking Schmidt: Google’s CEO in His Own Words

Ball Gag Starting to Look Like a Good Idea for Google CEO

DOJ Token Joins Hat, Dog, Shoe in Googolopoly

John Paczkowski — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:29:43 +0000

“Good for competition.” That’s how Omid Kordestani, Google’s (GOOG) senior VP of Global Sales and Business Development, described the advertising deal it struck last month with Yahoo (YHOO). “Why did we make this agreement?” he asked. “Quite simply, we think it is good for users, advertisers and publishers. By offering Google’s industry-leading technology to Yahoo, the whole system becomes more efficient, and everyone benefits.”

A reassuring profession of altruism, but one that the Justice Department isn’t buying. The agency has opened a formal antitrust investigation into the deal and will soon begin issuing civil investigative demands to the companies’ competitors, customers and potential partners in the hopes of determining whether it will further tighten Google’s near-monopoly grip on the search advertising market. “This is a complicated situation, but one of the key questions is very simple,” said David Balto, an antitrust lawyer who was competition policy director at the Federal Trade Commission during the Clinton administration. “What is Yahoo’s incentive to continue to compete?”

Good question.

Helpfully, Google and Yahoo have already agreed to delay implementing their new alliance for three and a half months so the DOJ can answer it.