>but gave Kinderstart leave to amend and resubmit its case

Maybe not F- / tossed ... more ...

could do better C- and chance to do it again.

Those that cannot compete in an open market litigate. Kinderstart's actions seem to spell out that "our money is better spent on attorney's instead of on our core business operations". This kind of makes you wonder about the viability of their business in the first place.

[edited by: jatar_k at 5:06 pm (utc) on July 14, 2006]

I went to Kinderstart's page and saw that even though they are filing a suit against Google and don't agree with Google's business practices they are still running Adsense advertisements on their page. An old saying comes to mind: "Don't bite the hand that feeds you!"

>but gave Kinderstart leave to amend and resubmit its case

Maybe not F- / tossed ... more ...

could do better C- and chance to do it again.

Federal courts almost always permit the losing party to amend after they lose a FRCP 12(b) summary disposition motion. Also, the plaintiff had previously amended the complaint, and really threw the entire kitchen sink at Google with their nine-count complaint. (Their comments in the article suggest that they are going to try to resurrect all nine counts; I personally think that would be bad lawyering.)

The court's ruling is something like a programmer who is told by a prospective customer, "We reject your program as a whole and we don't like any of its nine subroutines, but if you wish to rewrite it we'll take another look. Is that a C-?

"The complaint argued Google's growing dominance of Web search advertising makes it vital for businesses to rank high in Google search results. As such, Google has become an essential public facility for being discovered on the Web."

I agree wholeheartedly with this statement and have been saying exactly this for years on many forums. It's the same as the sole telephone service in the early days purposely providing crappy service to non-preferred customers so they can't conduct business properly with their clients (in fact I believe a certain US cellular phone service company lost a landmark class action suit recently over this exact thing) or saying who can have a telephone number and who can't or the goverment postal service deciding who can send or receive mail and who can't without even revealing WHY they decided such. In a competitive environment you simply find a new provider. But G HAS become THE monopolistic search engine. You might argue Y has a higher Alexa visitor ranking, but check the details: per Alexa people visit Y mostly for their e-mail and news - only less than 10% go for search while almost 75% of G's visitors are there for search. G beats Y almost 4 to 1 in volume of searches via our evidence.
A top ranking or lack of one on G or perhaps even on Y can definitely make or break a company. The fact that it has become known that it is NOT strictly a 100% algorithmic decision as they claimed in the past and that G frequently HAND-CHECKs and HAND-RATEs individual sites for penalization (recall the docs exposed last year on here) could be a further crucial point in this case since it seems to pivot on some sort of PR0 penalty. I'm simply surprised it took so long for someone to file the case.

The fact that it has become known that it is NOT strictly a 100% algorithmic decision as they claimed in the past and that G frequently HAND-CHECKs and HAND-RATEs individual sites for penalization (recall the docs exposed last year on here) could be a further crucial point in this case since it seems to pivot on some sort of PR0 penalty. I'm simply surprised it took so long for someone to file the case.

First, Google says that calculating PageRank is an objective process, but it doesn't claim that determining rankings is 100% objective. (Google representatives have often said that more than 100 factors go into the ranking process.)

Second, in its Webmaster Guidelines, Google warns that violating those guidelines can result in removal from the index and other "negative" outcomes.

Bottom line: Just because KinderStart's attorney didn't do his homework or chose to ignore the facts doesn't make his assertion true.

Google isn't a monopoly, isn't one at all.

(1) There are three strong search engine competitors -- Google has between 1/2 and 2/3 of the traffic. It's nothing at all like, say, Intel PC operating systems, where Microsoft's monopoly enables them to extort a license (often two or three licenses!) for every desktop system shipped, whether or not the user also buys an operating system.

(2) It's not clear that there's even a MARKET (remember, Microsoft, in the course of partly-successfully defending itself against various criminal charges, alleged that there wasn't a browser market because they had managed to so restrain trade that nobody could charge for browsers. Well, nobody has EVER been paying for searches. So the argument that wasn't valid there, IS more valid here.)

(3) The usual measures of monopolistic behavior obviously don't appear. Google neither inflates the cost of searches at its own site, nor suppresses the cost of searches elsewhere. (Both prices are identical and identically zero.)

Given these well-known facts, any lawyer or judge would have to come to the same conclusion.

The ONLY way that a search engine could get to be a monopoly, would be to work through the workstation operating system, or the major phone and cable companies to exploit net-non-neutrality to make people jump through painful flaming hoops to get to google instead of, say, MSN (just to name a company that IS already making deals with phone companies, and IS already a criminal monopolist, convicted in dozens of jurisdictions on at least three continents, based on illegally bundling applications with the operating system.)

There's no reason to ever think of Google as a monopoly. "Twice as big as your nearest competitor" is NOT "monopoly"! Every reason that might apply to Google, applies tenfold to one of its largest competitors.

It's as I expected, but anyone with this much control over distribution is going to be continually brought into question until something breaks. There's too many big anti control players involved - Governments, business' etc etc

The bottom line is do the people want such control of information distribution mostly in one camp ie Google or for that matter a cartel?

They are going to be kept progressively busy on all the fronts defending their position and I'm sure they'll do that well.

Google isn't a monopoly, isn't one at all.

From looking at my english log files I can understand you, but looking at the German logfiles with 91% incoming from Google, I find it hard to agree to above.

From looking at my english log files I can understand you, but looking at the German logfiles with 91% incoming from Google, I find it hard to agree to above.

Maybe KinderStart should have filed its suit in Germany. :-)

>The bottom line is do the people want such control of information distribution mostly in one camp ie Google or for that matter a cartel?

This is absurd. Google doesn't control any information other than the information they created. And the same thing is true of Yahoo and even MSN. They built a compendium of information about websites: a compendium consisting of two parts (1) words contained on the websites themselves, and (2) relevancy calculation.

Obviously and indisputably, the websites themselves can distribute their own words, with or without Google. (Many currently existing websites DID distribute their own words before Google or even Yahoo existed.) Google has absolutely no control over when, to whom, or under what conditions that information is distributed. It's nonsense to say otherwise.

And the relevancy/ranking calculations are Google's own information. They built the plumbing to distill it; they own it; like any other webmaster, they have absolute control over when, to whom, and under what conditions they distribute. However, more than any other engine except the late Inktomi, they've been open to deals allowing others to distribute.

The issue isn't about information at all, and it's disengenuous to claim otherwise.

The real issue is advertising. Google operates several advertising "bazaars". Of course, there is no monopoly here either: all the major portals have their own advertising bazaars, and there are a bazillion independent advertisers on the web. Anyone can choose between Google's ad exchanges, MSN's, Yahoo's, or any combination of the above: these are highly competitive, and no doubt kept so by the possibility of independent advertising campaigns.

But these two marketplaces in which Google has nothing resembling a monopoly, have nothing to do with each other. I look for information on the web, and I shop on the web. But there's no reason on earth I should use any of the same websites. Every consumer (of either information or klisch) has the choice, every time, of millions of websites. Every consumer has multiple ways of picking out trustworthy websites among all the pseudonymous doorways and plagiarizers (and in THAT important decision, Google gives no direct help at all!)

What does "cartel" have to do with this? There is no cartel here either. Several large organizations in competition (whether Google,Yahoo,MSN or Ford,GM,Chrysler) do not a cartel make. A cartel would be an organization like RIAA or OPEC, not competing against each other, but conspiring together to suppress competition. And the looniest peyotl-chewing, black-helicopter=viewing, nonsense-spewing conspiracy-theorist on earth hasn't yet suggested Microsoft and Google are conspiring together!

Search is an oligopolistic market. That's very obvious considering the current definitions of oligopoly and monopoly, however, nobody can deny that we are indeed heading towards market monopoly, wherein Google shall be the monopoly.

All seems well here except this part:

Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose

I wonder:

a) Would this decision be different in any other state (other than CA)?

b) Are there anything in the Google TOS that prevent cases from being brought against it in other states?

PS: Oligopolistic markets are still not "perfectly competitive" markets. So even though we aren't technically talking about monopolies here, we are talking about a market wherein healthy competition does not exist. So if they change what exactly they want to say in their accusations, they may still be in with a chance of winning (after all, they can resubmit)!

[edited by: Chico_Loco at 3:44 am (utc) on July 16, 2006]

Are there anything in the Google TOS that prevent cases from being brought against it in other states?

Their TOS have provide Google with little or no protection against being sued.
In principle, Google could be sued across much of the world provided a sufficiently strong case could be demonstrated.

Whatever the outcome of this and future cases, there will always be unhappy webmasters and that means there will always be people who want to sue. This being the case, I think Google would be well-advised to be much more open about manual interventions (and even automated penalties, if they exist). I imagine paranoid legal types would advise against publishing any information that could be used against Google in court and others would argue against providing information that could be used by spammers, etc. but I still think openness and honesty is the best policy, however...

...Google tends to talk about quality - that's a real bad idea from a legal viewpoint. Instead they should confine themselves to references about SEO rules. A site may be useful and be high-quality but if it breaks Google's SEO rules they are entitled to penalise it without commenting on usefulness or quality. However, a report should be made available detailing the rules that have been broken thereby allowing the webmaster to make changes, or not, it would be his/her choice.

If Google were to adopt this policy, webmasters would be happier (provided spam did not get worse) and it would be very very difficult to construct a legal case to sue Google with repect to SERPS.

Having said all that, I am still of the opinion that penalties are a really bad idea, instead, where black-hat SEO is detected it should simply be ignored (e.g. by ignoring invisible text) but that's another argument.

Kaled.