Senate Antitrust Hearing Sees Schmidt Defending Google

By Bhaskar Prasad | September 22 2011 6:49 AM

Defending his company's business practices on Capitol Hill for the first time after the mounting inspection of its operations, Google Inc. Chairman, Eric Schmidt, directly declined that his company was manipulating its search engine results to steer users to its own online services. During the investigation of complaints by competitors that Google was involved in the abuse of its control in the online search market to damage competition, Members of the Senate antitrust subcommittee directed questions at Schmidt.

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Over 64% of the market share of search-engine business is controlled by Google while its competitor, the search partnership of Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp, is way behind. Google is also on an expansion process in business domains such as travel data software and mobile phones, which will make use of the search engine facility.

The data collection practices of Google, which involve large volumes have been undergoing severe criticism due to which antitrust officials in the U.S., Europe and Asia have commenced upon inquiries.

The testimony given by Schmidt brought back the memory of the Microsoft incident in 1998, when the government launched a historic antitrust case against Microsoft, and Bill Gates, the then Chief Executive, was questioned on that.

The testimony of Schmidt portrayed Google as being passionately devoted to serving people as a search engine for the most helpful data and information on the Internet.

After Schmidt's testimony, competitors of Google testified in a second panel, an arrangement requested by Google and accepted by the subcommittee, saying that Google has immense market power and uses this power for its gain, the competitors put forward a picture which was very different from the one portrayed by Schmidt.