DOJ considers big picture approach with Google

The Department of Justice (DOJ) may be about to hand Google a surprise for its 10th anniversary, one that could make the next 10 years a lot less successful for the search giant. According to this CNET post by Charles Cooper, the DOJ is considering taking the antitrust suit route against Google, not just for its revenue-sharing deal with Yahoo, but more to address Google's overwhelming dominance in the online search advertising market as a whole. And that slant should make Google very nervous.

Unnamed sources familiar with the DOJ's thought process say the big sticking point is control:

"It's control, from both an advertising and societal view. There is growing concern about what happens if Google becomes the predominant gateway to information, if information passes through a single enterprise, characterized by a series of commercial algorithms that do what they do--and those algorithms are not subjected to outside review."

The tack, if true, seems eerily familiar. Microsoft first entered the antitrust sharkpool due to a small part of its business--whether or not it could incorporate the browser into its desktop operating system. But the real upshot of the investigation was Microsoft's bread-and-butter desktop OS business, and whether 90% control of the market constituted a monopoly. Google is in a similar place with online search advertising, controlling nearly 80% of the market, with a handful of players vying for the leftovers.

The broader the focus of the investigation, the longer Google will be bogged down in responding to it. And the fewer dollars and resources it will have to invest in new technologies, and in keeping its competitors at bay. Just ask Microsoft. While it became mired in its antitrust problems, Google came out of nowhere, saw the promise in collaborative cloud-computing and is poised to become the first serious contender to Microsoft's desktop OS dominance. Google should hope that this DOJ move doesn't germinate a similar scenario.

• antitrust
• competition
• desktop OS
• doj
• Google
• Microsoft
• monopoly
• search advertising