The New York Times is running an article by Stephen Labaton this morning about the Obama White House’s plans to get aggressive against corporations which are using market dominance as a tactic to gain more market share and shut out competition.
Head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Christine A. Varney, will be giving a speech today outlining new policy, or reversed policy, against such companies and strong arm tactics, and will also be speaking to the US Chamber of Commerce this week about the same matter.
Google and Microsoft are some of the first companies in our space which come to mind in such a policy shift (the Bush admin was very pro-BigBiz dominance). Google is currently under antitrust investigation by the Justice Department over its Google Book Search deal that it entered into with publishers and authors as the result of a 2005 class action suit by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google.
The settlement of this suit gives Google the ok to house the books online and make profit from their Google Book Search library, which is to be split between Google, authors and publishers. Critics of this deal say the settlement unfairly gives Google an exclusive license to profit from digitized books.
It’ll be quite interesting to see what happens with the Google – Obama love fest now. All this at the same time Google’s trying to prompt people into making Chrome their default browser – even specifically targeting explorer users. Regarding Microsoft, what’s the government going to do to them that hasn’t already been done?
If I TRUSTED the government, I might say this is a good thing. Are they going to go after the monopolistic social sites, like facebook – and penalize them for being TOO big?
I’m curious to know how the govt is going to penalize corporations thought to be “monopolizing” – taxes and overregulation?
Checks and balances are good – part of the free system. If something irritates you with the government – get involved . Freedom of speech is powerful when backed by positive action in the same direction. Otherwise, it’s whining. America is awesome – if you don’t like it – move.
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