ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Should the Google Search Engine Be Answerable To Competition Regulation Authorities? AKASH KRISHNAN Akash Krishnan (
[email protected]) is a doctoral student in Economics at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Vol. 53, Issue No. 35, 01 Sep, 2018 The thought process of major competition authorities across the globe and their response to Google’s conduct in terms of manipulating its search engine is traced in this article. “The predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users . we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” The above excerpt borrowed from Brin and Page (1998) is a testimony to the fact that the Google creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page foresaw the predicaments of operating a search engine prior to the launch of Google, much before it was faced with regulatory hurdles. Thus, it comes as no surprise perhaps that Google has been under the scanner of competition authorities across the globe including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of United States of America (US), the European Commission (EC) in the European Union (EU) and most recently the Competition Commission of India (CCI). The CCI on 8 February 2018 came out with an order imposing a Rs 136 crore fine on Google for “search bias” and ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 potential abuse of dominance. Google and Competition Regulation: The US and EU Experience The first real regulatory action against search engines was when FTC (2002) issued a letter in response to the complaint filed against the search engines of the time, namely Alta Vista Co, AOL, Time Warner Inc, Direct Hit Technologies, iWon, Inc, Looksmart Ltd, Microsoft Corp and Terra Lycos SA (Google had not emerged yet).