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Comments on the FTC antitrust investigation of Google

y of the publicly available documents on the 2011-2012 FTC investigation of Google's allegedly antitcompetive actions in search and ads, followed by a tech-focused analysis of the decision from someone who's worked at the two companies that are discussed in the most detail in the memos (Google and Microsoft), worked in search, and worked closely with ads teams on optimizing ads ranking algorithms. I've seen a number of law-focused and economics-focused analyses, but I haven't seen a tech-focused analysis in a level of detail I find satisfying.

Obama's FTC Commissioner appointee, GMU economist and legal scholar Josh Wright actually wrote a rebuttal titled "Requiem for a Paradox: The Dubious Rise and Inevitable Fall of Hipster Antitrust", a scathing critique of Khan's position. Even if you believe that, ceteris paribus, antitrust action would've been good for consumers and the "very good case" outcome in "what might've happened" would occur if antitrust action were pursued, it's still not obvious that Google and other tech companies are the right target as opposed to (just for example) Visa and Mastercard's dominance of payments, hospital mergers leading to increased concentration that's had negative impacts on both consumers and workers, Ticketmaster's dominance, etc.. Or perhaps you think the government should focus on areas where regulation specifically protects firms, such as in shipping (which is except from the Sherman Act) or car dealerships (which have special protections in the law in many U.S. states that prevent direct sales and compel car companies to abide by their demands in certain ways), etc. For example, Wal-Mart operates website as extension to retail and Best Buy's main goal of website is to provide presale info Most publishers hadn't seriously considered Bing due to poor monetization Amazon, which does use Bing and Google ads, uses a single syndication provider on a page to avoid showing the user the same ad multiple times on the same page; mixing and matching arrangement generally considered difficult by publishers Starting in 2008, Google systematically tried to lower revenue share for AdSense partners E.g., "Our general philosophy with renewals has been to reduce TAC across the board", "2009 Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC) was down 3 percentage points from 2008 attributable to the application of standardized revenue share guidelines for renewals and new partnerships...", etc.

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