No monopoly on thought: defending the indefensible

An attempt to defend Google from break-up still falls short of addressing the commercial reality faced by content providers and other online businesses.

by Rob Corbidge

Published:

Someone other than Google has turned up to defend Google. Notable in the public space is the lack of such voices, and one may draw a conclusion from that. Outside of the company's own lawyers, the only other place to really look for such defence is in its share price, which has largely seen an upwards tick in the past year regardless of perceived headwinds.

Whatever market sentiment is, and however much the AI hype train has carried investment money with it, on the ground, independents willing to bat for Mountain View are scarce, so when one emerges, we should look at what they say.

Enter Professor Herbert Hovencamp, arguably the leading authority on US anti-trust law. This week, Hovencamp penned an article in the New York Times "Breaking Up Google Would Be A Big Mistake" and set forth the argument, drawing on his considerable legal expertise and understanding of precedents, to essentially make the point that "If the government gets everything it wants, the result could remove some of the features that have made Google products so successful and result in a fractured system that requires greater user effort to get inferior results".

The words "inferior results" will send many site owners into a paroxysm, a well justified one too after endless search updates see fewer and fewer sources pushed higher and higher. If "inferior" means chaos for a time, then that's a price many of us are willing to pay. Let the chips fall where they may. At least we could live or die by commercial merit.

Being a former Sunday Times journalist, I was raised on the "counter intuitive" story: in short, the thing that tells you that thing you thought was so, isn't so. 

Professor Hovencamp enters this territory with the assertion that "History has shown us that courts are generally poor instruments for restructuring industries. Too often they simply make firms less competitive. The record of success is particularly poor in situations involving highly innovative companies that, like Google, have developed mainly by internal growth, rather than through acquisitions."

Courts, we can all agree, are a last resort. Or should be. That's why the Google case(s) have ended up in court, maybe? But that's not really the assertion that rankles though, it's more the idea that Google has grown mainly by internal growth. If internal growth is measured by employee numbers over the past 20 years, then yes. That isn't what is meant though. May we direct attention to the company's acquisitions, listed helpfully at length here.

More than 200. Look over what they are. DeepMind is obviously a stand-out in the current meta, with Google's entire strategy based around AI capabilities. It was knowledge they bought in, giving them a leap, even if the senior management only grasped the commercial importance of what they'd purchased rather late in the day. They still had DeepMind in their quiver, and that's quite an asset to possess.

Obviously, much of the learned professor's thought is directed at legal precedents in the US, and how anti-trust rulings have proven not quite as helpful as anticipated. Standard Oil is the one even ignoramuses such as myself know the loose story of, yet it would appear American consumers can still buy gas from countless sources. A thing in demand will find its way to market.

Addressing the possibility that Google could be forced to "license its trove of search data to rivals for 10 years" Hovencamp writes that "Having multiple firms offering search out of a common database is a little like promoting airline competition by creating more travel agents. While that produces more competition in ticket sales, it does nothing to make the airlines themselves more competitive."

This analogy requires some stress testing. First of all, it's data. The way Google slices it is the way that suits their aims. If there's anything we know about data, it's that the same data can be sliced different ways. Competitors would have to do that to differentiate themselves. What he fails to grasp is that Google is the airline, and moreover, you can only fly where they want, and the bloody destinations keep changing. November Core Update anyone?

As a last thought, as Marc Andreesen indicated in an interview recently, the incoming US administration may decide to investigate if any high-level political coercion influenced the behaviour of platforms over the past few years. We are obviously entering partisan territory here, and that's not our wish. However, power dynamics are real, and companies such as Google may have some difficult questions to answer.