Various enterprise parties are piling on to the Google antitrust issue in a big way.
Breaking news today shows many different names among dozens of companies with digital operations are contending that Google continues to give itself advantages with the structure of its dominant search engine.
Specifically, some of these companies are pointing at the practice of using the OneBox, which they say manipulates SERP results against their own web footprints.
“OneBoxes outline information and images in boxes placed near the top of search results and are often ways for local businesses to get more visibility,” writes Foo Yun Chee in an exclusive Reuters piece today. “For example, a search for local jobs might throw up a box offering Google’s job-search service, or a results for a flight query might have a box offering Google’s flights-search service.”
When you look at who’s signing onto this complaint, you see names like Yelp and Expedia, which makes sense because these companies make their bones in presenting data to users, often through search engine results.
In fact, in one way, you could say this anti-Google drive is one man’s crusade: at the Washington Post, Isabelle Lee and Emily Chang describe the efforts of Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman to ring the alarm bells and throw the rulebook at Google.
“We’re very encouraged by (the Google anti-trust case),” Stoppelman said recently according to the above coverage. “Google has behaved illegally and has leveraged its monopoly in ways that are destructive to innovation and competition. It’s bad for consumers, bad for small business owners. … They’ve really tried to maximize the revenue and in doing so have put the consumer in the back seat.”
One of Stoppelman’s biggest arguments is that Google’s practices go against the principle of rewarding good organic content.
To the extent that that’s true, it’s a powerful indictment against Google, partly because in the past, the monolithic tech company has said that its algorithms are trained to rank sites according to their natural organic content and the readership that that drives.
If we don’t have that kind of meritocracy online, then we don’t have a level playing field. It’s what Stoppelman and others are hoping national regulators will take a look at as the US and Europe continue to undertake broad inquiries into this aspect of the tech industry.
As an investor, it behooves you to keep on top of these kinds of happenings as they relate to your portfolio.
