[LINK] Google capitulates; FTC drops investigation

[Jan Whitaker]

  Google Antitrust Claims Dropped By FTC, Which Finds No Evidence Of 
Company Favoring Own Services
AP  |  Posted: 01/03/2013 12:29 pm EST  |  Updated: 01/03/2013 3:59 pm EST
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/03/google-antitrust-ftc_n_2403324.html

WASHINGTON -- Google is agreeing to license certain patents to mobile 
phone rivals and stop a practice of including snippets from other 
websites in its search results as part of a settlement to end a 
19-month investigation into the search leader's business practices, 
the Federal Trade Commission said Thursday.

U.S. antitrust regulators added that they have found no evidence to 
claims that Google unfairly favors its own services in search results.

Google did agree to license patents deemed to be "essential" for 
rival mobile devices such as Apple Inc.'s iPhone, Research in Motion 
Ltd.'s BlackBerry and smartphones running on a Microsoft Corp.'s 
Windows software. Some of the patents in question came as part of 
Google's $12.4 billion acquisition of device maker Motorola Mobility 
Holdings earlier this year.

Regulators say Google is also promising that upon request, it will 
exclude snippets copied from other websites in its summaries of key 
information, even though the company had insisted the practice is 
legal under the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Despite 
the fair-use practice, Google already had scaled back on the amount 
of cribbing, or "scraping," of online content after business review 
site Yelp Inc. lodged one of the complaints that triggered the FTC 
investigation.

The FTC's investigation focused on allegations that Google has been 
abusing its dominance in Internet search.

Google's rivals, including Microsoft Corp., say the search company 
has been highlighting its own services on its influential results 
page while burying the links to competing sites. Google Inc. has 
fiercely defended its right to recommend the websites that it 
believes are the most relevant. The FTC said it saw no evidence of 
wrongdoing in those recommendations.



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

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