Declan McCullagh reports from the front lines of the Google wars:
It was inevitable that Google, one of the world’s largest technology companies, would find itself in the crosshairs of the Washington antitrust establishment. But what is, or should be, a little surprising is how enthusiastic the establishment became about pulling the trigger.
Take an event I moderated last week in the U.S. Capitol building … In theory, members of Congress and their staff carefully craft public policies that encourage the development of new technologies and benefit the entire nation.
But the reality of the questions asked was less Schoolhouse Rock and more jockeying over who gets to be on the firing squad at a corporate execution. One staffer on the Senate antitrust committee offered this complaint, which I’m not making up: “Nobody on the panel talked about innovation and that being a potential harm to consumers.”
McCullagh notes one of the leading Senate antagonists towards Google is Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl. And as luck would have it, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz spent the bulk of his career as an aide to Kohl. Indeed, it was Kohl who helped engineer Leibowitz’s appointment to the Commission during the Bush administration.
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“Nobody on the panel talked about innovation and that being a potential harm to consumers.”
The knowledge problem restated: policy-makers are as dumb as dirt.
Dumb, petty, vindictive, cowardly, and jealous.
This might be an interesting case to shed light on the typically anti-business left. I don’t know many leftists who don’t constantly use Google. They aren’t generally thought of as “bad” business. But they’re undeniably “big” business. I’m interested in seeing what leftists, in particular, think of a company being hassled by the government simply by virtue of it being “big” but not necessarily “evil” (in a socialist sort of way). I look forward to hearing the gears grinding.
Google’s only mistake was in not making enough campaign contributions to politicians. Politicians use anti-trust to extort money from well-run companies in the same way that the mafia extorts protection money from small shop owners. The US has only one economic monopoly, Boeing Aircraft. Yet Boeing has never been hit with anti-trust because they lavish money on the pols.
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