FTC to Serve Google With Subpoenas in Broad Antitrust Probe

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Trade Commission will be serving Google with subpoenas in a broad antitrust probe. Stupid broads, always getting you in trouble.

The new FTC investigation, by contrast, will examine fundamental issues relating to Google's core search-advertising business, which still accounts for the majority of its revenue. Those issues include whether Google—which accounts for around two-thirds of Internet searches in the U.S. and more abroad—unfairly channels users to its own growing network of services at the expense of rivals'.

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Last I checked, I very much have the option to use other services, besides Googles. It's just that, Google's services are either free, or works really well.

Everyone else is butt hurt because they can't compete.

I think the issue might be that if Google is charging full value for its ad services but somehow priviledging it's own ads/services without full disclosure to those it is selling ads to, there might be a problem.

After reading the article, I just keep thinking of the EU nonsense with Microsoft over Internet Explorer. In my opinion, google should be able to place links to their own services wherever they want within their own products. Google search is a Google product that should be able to display links using whatever algorithm they want to use.

Example algorithm: result.Rank=result.relevancy+result.isGoogle*10000+result.isMicrosoft*(-10000)

If that happens to be their algorithm, then so what. People can use bing and whatnot if they dont like the results. Advertisers can find other ways to advertise if they feel like the money they spend is not worth the results. Websites need to learn how to not rely on google. The really good websites out there aren't found through google.

Let the market decide. If people do not like the results than they are free to search elsewhere. That being said I swore of Google Docs and Calendar a long time ago because the services went down as some pretty inconvenient times for me last year.