US vs EU Trade Regulation practices
Recently, Microsoft decided to file an Anti-Trust complaint to the European Union over some of their search practices [story].
They claim that Google has implemented anti-competitive business practices in youtube and it’s “Book Search” feature. Microsoft claims that these practices prevent Bing from effectively competing with Google in the search engine space. Looking at the EU Trade Commission’s past decisions, many analysts think that Microsoft has a good chance at winning this battle.
Here in the US, we tend to understand why Google does such things, and we don’t do anything about it. Since they make their money from search and advertisements in search, they have an economic interest in making things difficult for Microsoft to index and effectively use on their sites. In the US, we acknowledge a companies total goal, and let it become big, with many competing interests.
However, the EU Trade Commission sees things a bit differently. On their website, their mission states that they are in the regulation game to help promote competition, jobs, and innovation to benefit consumers and companies alike. To do this, the EU has most likely narrowed their view of business. They see “Big Business” as a bad thing for consumers, and instead choose to reward targeted businesses rather than large businesses with competing interests.
Previously, the EU told Microsoft to include different browsers within windows to allow users to choose which browser they would like to use [link].
By encouraging companies to not bundle in their own software, the EU encourages consumers to make choices about which product they think is better. The EU encourages fluidity in the free market, which encourages innovation that helps consumers and business alike.
If we embraced this strategy in the US, we would put a check on big business by encouraging smaller businesses to compete with big business when they slack off.
However, we all know that current FTC is pretty spineless, and would likely be under too much pressure from lobbyists to ever implement such a strategy.
TL;DR: The FTC Should take a page from the EU Trade Commission’s book.
Anonymous
