Google, Microsoft and Yahoo lawyers yesterday answered lawmakers' questions about the effect Yahoo's deal to outsource some of its search to Google will have on the search ad market. Microsoft's top lawyer, Brad Smith, said the deal will eliminate Yahoo as a competitor from the market and drive up prices for…
Google has come under increasing fire for a lack of transparency in how it does everything — from keeping porn off YouTube to calculating advertising rates to determining which search results go where. I may personally distrust the wise benevolence of markets, but information asymmetry is a time-tested business…
European regulators are looking into whether IBM is unfairly dominating the mainframe market. What, is this 1968? IBM's purchase of Platform Solutions, a 36-person rival which made cheaper versions of IBM's mainframes, would normally be too small to rouse antitrust inquiries. But, amid accusations that IBM bought the…
"What is Yahoo's incentive to continue to compete?" That's the question Clinton-era Federal Trade Commission competition policy director David Balto asked of the search advertising deal between Yahoo and Google. And that's just one of many questions that will be asked by the Department of Justice now that officials…
Board members, employees, shareholders and now Congressional lawmakers wonder whether Yahoo CEO made the right call outsourcing Yahoo search ads to Google. Yang is in Washington to answer their concerns, meeting with Senator Herb Kohl (D.-Wisc.) and Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) yesterday. Later this week, he'll…
The National Black Chamber of Commerce has weighed in against the partnership between Google and Yahoo, suggesting that by gaining control of Yahoo's search advertising inventory, it will create a single auction market for search ad placement and lead to higher prices.
If Yahoo outsources search to Google, Microsoft will come screaming to antitrust regulators. How will Microsoft lawyers make their case? They'll let Yahoo docs do the talking. Before Yahoo was for outsourcing its search to Google, Yahoo was against outsourcing its search to Google. To explain why, Yahoo execs prepared…
"Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete." — Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, whose company remains under antitrust supervision, at the All Things Digital conference Tuesday.
In the '90s, Washington PR firm Chlopak Leonard Schechter pushed anti-Microsoft information that its client, Oracle, had obtained through hiring investigators to rifle through garbage. Now working for Google, Chlopak is taking a greener approach: It's reusing Google-friendly quotes already aired in the press as…
Yahoo executives want to let Google serve ads next to its search results. But that would mean Google would be selling ads on 80 percent of all search queries online. Microsoft won't let that happen without stirring up antitrust fears in Washington. Secret Google sources tell the New York Times they plan to get around…
Taking questions after a speech before the New America Foundation, Google cofounder Larry Page told the crowd the reason Microsoft and Yahoo shouldn't merge is that it would give Microsoft too much control over email and instant messaging. "90 percent of the communications all in one company, I think that's a really…
Yahoo shares are hovering around $25 because investors hope major Yahoo shareholders can still force a deal with Microsoft at $33 per share or more. But at Google's annual shareholder meeting yesterday, cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt tried their best to destroy those hopes, amping up talk of a deal that…
After more than a decade of trans-Atlantic antitrust scrutiny, one would think Microsoft would be, oh, I don't know, subtle about its ambitions to destroy a competitor. Someone in Microsoft's European HR offices didn't get the message. A poster advertising jobs at Microsoft Europe lists, among other qualities it's…
