"On Nov. 17, Google began running ads on Google Finance, a financial-news site, and said it would soon start showing ads to some users of its Google News service as well." That was the big news in the Wall Street Journal's front page story "Google gears down for tougher times."
Is Google, which owns the world's largest Internet audience, with over 700 million users, a direct competitor to all media? You bet!
The anticompetitive significance and conflicts of interest in what Google is now doing are very large.
To date Google lulled its competitors into a false sense of security in building an audience for Google News and Google Finance but not directly competing with Google's supposed media partners for online ads.
- The Googleopoly is now behaving like any monopoly does.
The problem for media companies is that Google is a non-transparent black box, which represents itself to be an honest broker of ads -- when it is not. It obviously has a huge financial conflict of interest in serving ads.
- How can Google claim to be an honest broker of online ads when it controls ~90% of all online avertising profits in the U.S. and is planning to blatantly self deal and front run the interests of their media customers?
What Google is proposing to do is the conflict of interest equivalent of auditing their own books, or grading their own papers.
- This doesn't pass the smell test or the laugh test.
Bottom line:
If media companies do not complain to the DOJ and State AGs that Google's new behavior is patently anti-competitive, they deserve the large and rapid anti-competitive losses they will undoubtedly suffer.
