How can this company, asks Brian S Hall, complain about anti-competitive behavior?
The open letter by Google’s (GOOG) chief legal counsel attacking Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) and calling for government intervention (see here) has unleashed a flood of outraged responses, but none quite so full throated as the one posted by Brian S Hall on his Smartphone Wars blog.
The nut paragraph:
“If you have a monopoly business and generate monopoly profits and take those monopoly profits to another industry and *gave away* what your competitors (must) charge for, which led you to quickly capture the *dominant* market share, would you…
…whine like a bitch?”
If you don’t get the “whine like a bitch” reference, read Brian Drummond’s letter on Google’s official blog.
If you have trouble seeing Google as a monopoly — and if you only knew Google from its lightning-fast search engine or its marvelous maps, you might — Hall is happy to enumerate. He lists 10 instances of Google (“a company that innovates at nothing,” he says) using its dominant position in one business to enter new markets and destroy existing businesses — a textbook definition of illegal monopolistic behavior.
Below: Hall’s 10 examples, verbatim.
- Yelp gets popular? Copy their info, shove Yelp to the bottom of the page and put Google Places and reviews at the top.
- Groupon won’t sell? Spend billions from other businesses to destroy them.
- Twitter and Facebook innovate on search? Take their content, whine when they try and stop you then spend billions to prevent their growth and hopefully destroy them.
- Apple working on a touchscreen smartphone? Spend billions from another business and copy everything you can, down to swipes and apps.
- Need a smartphone operating system with Java. Take Java and use it for your own ends.
- Need a location mapping technology and Skyhook won’t sell? Spend billions from your monopoly profits and strongarm your partners and drive Skyhook out of business.
- Buy up the big travel search sites.
- Claim you are open source but share nothing related to what your business claims to be about — search, and nothing related to how you make your money — advertising
- Claim you are open and standards based but control who gets access to your smartphone operating system
- Like all rich monopolists, they spend millions hiring high priced lobbyists and public relations teams inside the Beltway — for their direct benefit
He could go on, and he does. It’s a classic Brian S Hall rant.
NOTE: Business Insider has reposted Hall’s item in full, but not before removing some of its pungency by replacing the word “pussy” throughout with “[lame].” The piece is better in the original form, which you can get here.
