King of the Hill

By Brad

Earlier in the week, word surfaced that the European Union would be conducting an antitrust investigation into Google. While it turns out the investigation talk was premature — the EU has released a statement clarifying no investigation is happening yet — GigaOm believes that trouble could be coming soon for Google:

The bigger question, of course, is whether Google deserves to be the subject of an antitrust investigation — whether in the European Union or anywhere else — and the uncomfortable answer is that it probably does (Google has also been more than happy to egg regulators on when Microsoft was the target). That’s not to say the company should be subjected to a five-year-long saga of drawn-out court challenges and posturing by federal authorities and regulators, the way Microsoft was. It’s simply a recognition of the fact that Google is a very different company now than it was even three or four years ago. Its market power is almost unparalleled, particularly in search-related advertising, which is to the web economy what steam power was to the industrial revolution.