It looks like Google has drawn the attention of Mommy Government with the proposed partnership with yahoo. It is another case of people crying about big companies being “anti-competitive”. Google owns 70% of the search market and yahoo has about 20%. I am not a math wiz but that leaves about 10%. Other companies are obviously able to get a portion of the business and they are doing so. I understand that Google is huge so that makes them an easy target. The average Joe will not care if some rich tech guys get harassed by the feds. I just don’t understand what is anti-competitive here. No one is forcing any webmasters to use Google’s services. We are free to get our own advertising for our sites instead of using adsense. And we can shop around for other ad space for our businesses instead of using adwords from the Googsters. I can just hear the whiners now, “but it is not fair, we don’t have a chance against a big company like Google, they have to be stopped”. People with that attitude will never be competitive anyway because they will not try. They would rather use the FORCE of government to get there way. Using bureaucrats to force companies to do what the competition wants is more anti-competitve than anything I can imagine.
A few years back there was no such thing as search marketing but since Google perfected it (until someone does it better) some folks believe they need to be punished. It is similar to the merger between XM & Sirius Satellite Radio. The FCC wanted to keep it from happening or impose big restrictions on what changes the companies could make when they combined. The reasoning said that the consumer had to be protected. Protected from what? 10 years ago this technology was not even available but all of a sudden consumers have a RIGHT to a certain price and conditions on satellite radio. Bureaucrats are basically saying that average Americans are too stupid to make good consumer decisions so we will do it for them. These big companies provide a great service to people and that is how they make millions. They should not be punished for doing humanity a favor.