United States vs. Google (revisited)

Summer is a good time to pick lazily at the archives. Here's a post that originally appeared on Rough Type on October 12, 2006. Given last week's news that the Federal Trade Commission has launched a formal anti-trust investigation of Google, it seems timely to repost it now. Every era of computing has its defining antitrust case. In 1969, at the height of the mainframe age's go-go years, the Justice Department filed its United States vs. IBM lawsuit, claiming that Big Blue had an unfair monopoly over the computer industry. At the time, IBM held a 70 percent share of the mainframe market (including services and software as well as machines). In 1994, with the PC age in full flower, the Justice Department threatened Microsoft with an antitrust suit over the company's practice of bundling products into its ubiquitous Windows operating system. Three years later, when Microsoft tightened the integration of its Internet Explorer browser into Windows, the government acted, filing its United States vs. Microsoft suit. With Google this week taking over YouTube, it seems like an opportune time to look forward to the prospect - entirely speculative, of course - of what could be the defining antitrust case...