Last week, the European Commission — which is investigating whether Google’s search engine violates European antitrust law — received a formal letter of complaint from an interested party. The complainant charged Google with “a broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping anyone else from creating a competitive alternative.” It accused the company of hurting consumers by refusing to open up services such as YouTube to other search engines, said that its practices were “disconcerting” and “troubling,” and called on European officials to step in and clamp down.
The outfit lobbying the EC wasn’t some strident consumer-affairs group. It was Microsoft, the proprietor of Bing, the second-biggest search engine — and a company that knows thing or two about anti-competitive behavior and the legal repercussions thereof.
After all, in 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Microsoft over its bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, saying that it gave it an unreasonable advantage over other browser makers such as Netscape. A judge initially ruled that the software behemoth should be split into two companies; it eventually avoided that fate but did agree to operate under restrictions designed to give its rivals a fighting chance.
Seeing Microsoft play the role of 97-pound weakling shows how things have changed since the nineties, when it was a musclebound terror that kicked sand in the faces of other tech companies at will. But it’s far from the only player questioning Google’s recent behavior. For example, Google Books suffered a massive setback last month when a federal judge rejected the settlement Google had reached with publishers to permit selling of twelve million scanned e-books as anti-competitive. Three states are reportedly poised to launch antitrust probes. Rumor even has it that the federal government may launch an investigation as soon as it can figure out whether the Justice Department or the FTC should be doing the investigating.
It’s true that certain things about Google’s position on the Web are reminiscent of the clout Microsoft wielded back when the computing universe revolved around desktop PCs. Google’s share of the U.S. search market stands at a daunting 65 percent; most of the rest is taken up by Bing and by Bing-powered results at Yahoo.
Consumers, in other words, tend to be pretty good at figuring out what’s good for consumers. I trust their take on Google and its competitors more than that of any government agency. And the great democratizing power of the Internet puts them in an excellent position to call the shots.
McCracken blogs about personal technology at Technologizer, which he founded in 2008 after nearly two decades as a tech journalist. On Twitter, he’s @harrymccracken. His column, also called Technologizer, appears every Thursday on TIME.com.
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