Image Source: USA TODAY

BY JIAXI LU

ANCHOR AUSTIN KIM

You're watching multisource tech video news analysis from Newsy. 

Has Google -- overstepped its bounds?
The Federal Trade Commission is about to launch an antitrust investigation into Google, investigating whether the Internet giant has broken any antitrust laws.  
Here’s CBS.

“The search giant has been accused by competitors of favoring its own sites and services in its results and now the attorney general of California, Ohio and New York have started investigations and the Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether google abused its dominance in the realm of Internet search engines. The Wall Street Journal says The FTC will issue subpoenas within days. So far Google is not commenting.”

The Inquirer’s Dean Wilson says Google is not only the world’s top search engine.
It’s in a good position to defend itself by claiming a monopolies in and of themselves aren’t illegal.

“What constitutes as abuse will likely be a major argument in the courts, with rivals presumably arguing that they are losing business to Google’s growing empire. Rivals losing business is not necessarily something that authorities can rap Google’s knuckles for, as it is part and parcel of normal competition, providing Google has not done anything unlawful in its attempts to be the biggest search engine cat in town.”

An analyst from Bloomberg says the question isn’t really if Google is a monopoly.  The question is -- if it is abusing it’s market position.

“Basically Google is a monopoly. They say ‘you can search on google or you can go to other places’ but they pretty much are a monopoly. That’s not wrong. If you are a good company you become monopoly. What’s wrong is to use your monopoly power to advantage your company in other areas of your businesses. So to go into something else in another ares where you don’t have a monopoly and use your monopoly to help it. Now, is Google doing that? It’s gonna be a hard case to prove.”

Senator Michael Lee told USA TODAY, Google’s top executives have flat-out refused to appear at a hearing by the Senate’s anti-trust subcommittee about business practices in the search industry.
Consumer Watchdog’s Jamie Court wants Google to answer the questions.

“For a company whose mission is openness and transparency, Google has an obligation to be open with Congress and the American people and have the top executives answers questions with openness and transparency.”

New York Times cited data from comScore...

“Google in May became the first company to have one billion unique visitors to its site in one month, a rate that was up 8 percent over a year earlier. Google’s share price is down 19 percent since the beginning of the year.”

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